This white paper provides a basic understanding of the building blocks of IT and business continuity—from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the business impact of downtime and selecting the right software solution. Readers will be able to quickly match their specific optimum uptime objectives with the easiest and most cost-effective IT.
The One Essential Guide
to Disaster Recovery:
How to Ensure IT and
Business Continuity
W H I T E P A P E R
Start Here: Basic DR
Only 6 percent of For today's small and mid-sized businesses, the risk and effects from any"companies suffering unplanned outage (downtime) grow with each additional critical application,from a catastrophic network enhancement or system upgrade. We don't have to look back verydata loss survive, while far to see the consequences of sudden or unexpected disasters affecting the43 percent never reopen IT infrastructure of major cities and businesses of every description.and 51 percent closewithin two years."- University of Texas Consequently, IT managers have been-or soon will be tasked-to find waysto mitigate, eliminate or minimize as cost-effectively as possible the risks andeffects of unplanned outages on the business. And, even more important,their executives will want assurances that information assets-data andapplications-can remain available no matter what happens.
This white paper will help you ensure business continuity and survival byleading you through three essential steps-from understanding the conceptsof disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the businessimpact of downtime.
We will discuss in general terms the concepts of business continuity anddisaster planning. We will focus primarily on specific IT strategies you caneasily and affordably implement.
Bottom line: Disaster recovery plans and data replication alone are notenough. You will want to look for the most effective way to ensure theoptimum level of business uptime for your organization. This white paper willhelp you match your specific optimum uptime objectives with the bestavailability choice.
1 v i s i o n s o l u t i o n s . c o m
W H I T E P A P E R
Step 1: Getting Started
Gartner estimates that Before you begin reviewing the available technologies that support disaster recovery, you first"only 35 percent of SMBs have must consider the business. You need to identify which business processes are mostimportant to keeping your business operational. a comprehensive disasterrecovery plan in place. Once you have identified the most critical business processes, work with the business units" to determine their availability requirements for each process. Document the requirements inan internal SLA that specifies the availability goals for each process and articulates the costsof not meeting the goals. For example:
At company A, the order entry and shipping departments require that their informationinfrastructure processes must be functional 24 hours every day of the year exceptcorporate holidays. If this requirement is not met, the company loses 80 percent of itsproductivity, which translates to $10,000 (US) per hour plus penalties of $100,000 perhour for every hour the processes are unavailable.
At company B, the payroll department requires that their information infrastructureprocesses must be functional from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Notmeeting this requirement costs the company 50 percent of their productivity, whichtranslates to $1000 (US) per hour of downtime.
Another organization, company C has the need to comply with strict informationavailability requirements due to government regulations and has made it imperative thatits applications remain available even during routine backup processes.
Documenting the cost of not meeting availability requirements helps you determine the valueof a software investment used to improve availability. This information also helps youprioritize the processes to analyze. After documenting the service levels required, you canstart analyzing the availability needs of each business process technology by technology.
Understanding Downtime and Availability
Most organizations define "availability" somewhere along a continuum between multiplehours of downtime with significant data loss to real-time 24/7 uptime with zero data loss.Your definition depends on your business needs, your data and application requirements andyour organizational structure. The goal, however, should be to prevent the inevitable systemdowntime from affecting business uptime.
There are two types of downtime: unplanned and planned.
Unplanned Downt... [download for more]
