Four Best Practices For IT Availability And Service Continuity Management
You need to have a framework in place to manage disaster recovery preparedness as a continuous process, not a one-time event, says Forrester's Stephanie Balaouras. Here are four practical pieces of advice.
Wed, December 16, 2009
CIO —
Forrester often gets inquiries such as, "What requirements should we keep in mind while developing our disaster recovery plans and documents?" and, "Which strategies work best for managing our disaster recovery program once it's in place?"
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning Definition and Solutions
Technology supports disaster recovery preparedness, but it doesn't constitute a strategy or plan. You need to have a framework in place to manage disaster recovery preparedness as a continuous process, not a one-time event. Processes have to be in place to ensure that disaster recovery plans are continuously updated as a part of change and configuration management and are regularly tested. In addition, it's important to periodically update the business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessments (RAs) that provide the key inputs into the development of your disaster recovery strategy and specific plans. By taking a proactive approach to disaster recovery, rather than being unprepared when a disaster occurs, you will save your company substantial money in the long run. Organizations that take this more proactive, more holistic approach, often use the term IT service continuity rather than "disaster recovery."
However, as companies become increasingly dependent on IT for day-to-day business operations, business owners demand greater levels of IT availability, sometimes at 99.95% or better. This has forced IT operations teams to revisit their strategies for both local high availability and IT service continuity. So, technology decisions play a vital role in supporting your overall strategy.
Forrester sees Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals evaluating technologies and services such as:
1. Local and long-distance clustering for zero downtime.
2. Server virtualization high availability and fault-tolerant technology for near-zero downtime at the primary site as well as rapid restart of virtual machines at the recovery site.
3. Local snapshots and remote replication technology for near-zero data loss.
The "how to" of IT availability and service continuity is not the only challenge. If money were no object, I&O professionals could implement solutions that would enable zero downtime and zero data loss for all their IT systems.
But the pressure to maintain or reduce IT costs means that they must justify the investment in availability technologies by categorizing IT systems in terms of their criticality and implement the most cost-effective solutions to achieve agreed-upon recovery objectives or service-level agreements (SLAs). Determining the criticality of IT systems and writing meaningful, achievable objectives or SLAs with business owners are often far more challenging than the implementation of the technology itself.
In recent research for its Infrastructure & Operations Council, Forrester uncovered four best practices:
