Friday, November 24, 2006

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery

In some IT environments, a Disaster Recovery Plan is much like an insurance policy. You know that you have to have it, but you hope you never need it. Does the DR plan actually provide a framework that will ensure recovery of the enterprise? Or is it just enough to meet compliance requirements and satisfy the auditors? Is a functional Disaster Recovery plan sufficient for the enterprise, or should you move towards a true Business Continuity environment? What would be the true impact to the organization if you had no access to any IT resources for a day, or three days or longer?

In other words, does the existing IT Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plan satisfy the true business requirements?

These are questions that CIO’s and IT managers need to ask themselves. The answers may be uncomfortable – especially in this era of shrinking IT budgets.

Many studies by Gartner and others have indicated that a large number of companies will be “out of business” if an IT outage lasts more than a couple of days. This provides a compelling rationale for implementing true Business Continuity.

An effective Business Continuity plan and implementing a storage infrastructure supported by advanced recovery services such as Disk Mirroring can ensure that critical IT services are restored within minutes or hours instead of days.

Enterprise Storage Solutions for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity in the z/OS and large systems environments

Mike Smith
Enterprise Storage Solutions Architect
Recovery Specialties, LLC