Business continuity is the ability of a business to continue to operate in the face of disaster. All functional departments within a company are involved in business continuity. Facilities management needs to be able to provide alternative buildings for workers. Manufacturing needs to develop ways of shifting work to outsourcers, partners, or other factories to make up for lost capacity. Planning and execution of a business continuity plan is an executive-level function that takes into account all aspects of business operations.
Information technology plays a key role in maintaining operations when disaster strikes. For most modern companies to function properly, communications must be restored quickly. Phone systems and e-mail are especially important, because they are primary communications media and usually are brought online first. After that, different systems are restored, depending on the needs of the business.
Protecting data and the access to it is a primary component of business continuity strategies. Restoring systems whose data has been destroyed is useless. What is the point of restoring the financial system if all the financial data has disappeared? IT, like other departments, needs to ensure that the data entrusted to it survives. In many cases, it is less important that the hardware systems themselves survive, so long as critical data does. If the data is still intact, new hardware can be purchased, applications reloaded, and operations restored. It might be a slow process, and there will be financial ramifications, but at least the business will eventually return to normalcy. Without the data, that will never happen.
THE CHANGING FACE OF DATA PROTECTION
In the past, data protection meant tape backups. Some online protection could be
obtained by using RAID (which is explained in Chapter 2) to keep data intact and
available in the event of a hard drive failure. Most system administrators relied on
copying data to tape and then moving some of those tapes offsite. This is still the
most common form of data protection, but only part of a whole suite of techniques
available for safeguarding data.
Remote Data Movement and Copy
It was natural to extend the paradigm of duplicating important data on another
disk (RAID) to duplicating it to another storage system, perhaps located in a different
place. In this process, called remote copy, exact copies of individual blocks
of data are made to a remote system. This system might be right next door or hundreds
of miles away. Remote copy allows a second storage system to act as a hot
backup or to be placed out of harm’s way and available for the disaster-recovery
site to use. At present, remote-copy systems tend to be expensive. The telecommunications
needed to support them present the IT manager with a high recurring
expense. The costs involved with remote copy have tended to relegate its use to
high-end applications and very large companies.