Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – the WAN is a Strategic Component

ECESSA
White Paper
Business Continuity and
Disaster Recovery - the
WAN is a Strategic
ComponentWhite Paper
Business Continuity is the plan and preventative mechanisms that help businesses remain up and running in the event of a disaster. Business Continuity is not something implemented at the time of a disaster. Rather, Business Continuity represents the activities performed daily to maintain service, consistency, and recoverability. Business Continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. Incidents may include local events such as building fires, regional events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms and floods or national events. From a network technology standpoint, Business Continuity can be affected by network connectivity failing, or a WAN link being congested or bottlenecked, which may limit business functions.The foundation of Business Continuity is the policies, guidelines, standards, and procedures implemented by an organization. All system design, implementation, support, and maintenance must be based on this foundation in order to have any hope of achieving Business Continuity and disaster recovery.
OverviewIP-based Wide Area Networks (WANs) which comprise the Internet have become the default communication method for organizations in all vertical markets to conduct business through transaction-based applications and communicating with customers, vendors, partners and remote employees. While WAN infrastructure has become a ubiquitous communications method, it also presents many challenges associated with ensuring Business Continuity. While Internet Service Providers (ISP) continue to improve upon their ability to deliver consistent service, ISP outages continue to be a problem. As long as natural disasters, equipment failures, human error and security threats remain, ISP outages will continue to be an issue. Organizations that rely upon ISP connectivity need to take proactive measures to ensure the resiliency of their business, including their WAN infrastructure. Addressing secure and reliable WAN (Internet) access going out from the LAN, and coming into the LAN is critical for today's Business Continuity and disaster recovery planning.The benefits of a sound disaster recovery plan are evident. During major hurricanes, thanks to IT facilities located outside of the disaster areas, businesses located in the Southeastern part of USA were able to recover quickly. The case for a solid Business Continuity and disaster recovery plan is made even stronger when you consider the diversity of today's workforce, with the increase in remote branch offices, road-warriors and telecommuters. The Internet, and the web in particular, have made it possible through the use of diverse technologies to enable secure access to business applications via VPN, or in conjunction with wireless networks. However, it is important to note that the resiliency of this approach depends upon the flexibility of the WAN infrastructure. Also it is important to note that if remote access to the main headquarters, remote offices or a disaster recovery site is removed, any amount of Business Continuity and disaster recovery preparedness at those sites will be of no use.
Business Transactions over the WAN Pose Major Challenges to Ensuring Business ContinuityBusiness Continuity planning covers many aspects of an organization's ability to avoid major business disruption from a disaster. For IT risk mitigation, the protection and prevention of lost data has been a principal concern. However, in recent years, Internet infrastructure and the systems that support it are taking a more prominent role in their ability to automate business processes and communication across an organization, their customers, and partners.One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways of dealing with WAN reliability issues is multi-homing, using a specialized WAN Optimization Controller (WOC) capable of WAN link load balancing and failover. An organization will use a multi-homed network to bundle two or more WAN links and/or service providers to connect their LAN to the Internet. If they have multiple sites they can also use this technique to interconnect between sites to ensure reliability and optimum performance for critical applications.This paper... [download for more]