End-users tend to focus too heavily on
data protectionand do not make provision for
rapid recovery of business-critical systems and processes, says
continuity services providerNeverfail.
Jim Battenberg, director product marketing at Neverfail will
tell attendees at next
week'sBusiness
Continuity Expo in London that organisations should aim to
achieve continuous connectivity to mission-critical applications
and the highest possible level of automation in
disaster recovery.
Battenberg said a
risk management approach to business continuity entailed
understanding how quickly an organisation can recover from a
disaster, the level of complexity, and how many manual processes
were involved.
"The more automated a recovery system is, the lower the exposure
to risk and the less dependent the organisation is on the
availability of staff with specific skills to restore business
systems," he said.
Battenberg said the human element was often overlooked. "It is
not always easy to hire IT people with the right expertise to keep
systems up and running, particularly for small and medium sized
businesses," he said.
Given the myriad of backup and recovery technologies that are
available, Battenberg said he would advise organisations to look
for those that are extremely flexible and adaptable to the existing
environment.
"You want to look for something that allows you to use the
hardware that is already in an organisation's IT infrastructure ,
that will work over any type of network, that does not have any
common storage, and that has no single point of failure," he
said.
The next step, said Battenberg, would be to go through the
organisation's infrastructure and match up business criticality and
required uptime to decide what kind of availability is needed for
each.
He said smaller businesses in particular should use this
business risk approach to ensure availability only for mission
critical systems to ensure business continuity and keep costs to a
minimum.
"Back-up and restore may be enough for some applications. You
need to look at each of the applications and the implications of it
being down, and then find the business continuity technology that
best fits those needs," Battenberg said.