An Automated Disaster Recovery Solution is the Lynchpin to a Viable Business Continuity Plan

By: Jerome M. Wendt

Thursday, September 24, 2009

"Business Continuity" and "Disaster Recovery" are two aspects of IT and business planning and process management that no organization can afford to get wrong. So it is somewhat disconcerting that a recent article reports that the majority of businesses do not yet have a disaster recovery plan or business continuity process in place or, if they do, they do not regularly test it. But of greater concern is that many users still fail to understand the differences between business continuity and disaster recovery and how these processes should be individually implemented and managed.

The lack of understanding about these two processes was brought into focus by a recent blog that appeared on the Storage Monkeys' website. The challenges that users face according to this blog is that vendors have a proclivity to refer to any type of IT mishap as a "disaster" and that once this occurs they need to begin a "disaster recovery" exercise using a "business continuity" solution. Mixing this terminology is resulting in users becoming confused about the two terms and even prompted the blogger to educate himself about the differences between "business continuity" and "disaster recovery".

"Business continuity" and "disaster recovery" processes are related to one another but only in the sense that "disaster recovery" is a subset of "business continuity". These two processes are summarized as following:

  • Business continuity (BC) is the ability for a business to continue all of its operations but especially its critical business functions even in the face of difficult circumstances such as a disaster. An important part of a business continuity plan is recovering and running your business operations at an alternate site. This includes not only DR but also things like how do I get my people there, where do they stay, how do I keep the facility secure, how do I handle communications, etc.  In short, BC can be summarized by the following equation: "BC = IT infrastructure recovery + people + process".
  • A disaster recovery (DR) refers to the specific plans and processes that a business puts in motion when a disastrous event occurs be it a manmade (human error, terrorism, war) or natural (earthquake, flood, or hurricane) occurrence. DR is the "IT infrastructure recovery" component in the BC equation and depends on technologies like backup tapes, CDP, replication, etc. to recover at a remote site.
Here is where the confusion often arises. Replication software vendors routinely claim to offer business continuity solutions but replication software does not have anything to do with solving the people and process components of the BC equation. All replication software addresses is IT infrastructure recovery and maybe even more specifically application recovery.

However because so much of an organization's total disaster recovery plan depends on recovering applications first, recovering applications quickly is critical to recovering the business as a whole. So whatever an organization can do to automate application recoveries when a disaster occurs can directly impact whether or not a business survives when a disaster strikes.

Granted, a business can never account for every possible disaster that might occur and put in place a solution that automates recoveries for every scenario. But a business can account for more disasters than it might think. Fires, floods, human errors, power outages and tornados are all examples of minor and major disasters that can be addresses partially or in whole addressed by putting in place a solution like InMage Systems Scout that can help businesses quickly recover should a disaster strike.

Understanding the differences between business continuity and disaster recovery is critical to quantifying where businesses are at in their recovery planning. But once businesses understand that disaster recoveries are a subset of business continuity and application recoveries are even a subset of disaster recovery, then it becomes critical for businesses to identify solutions that automate applications recoveries should a disaster actually occur. Solutions like InMage Systems Scout can serve as the lynchpin to delivering a viable business continuity plan for the entire organization and move them come closer to delivering on this ideal

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