Solutions for Business Continuity

Effective IT disaster recovery is a key component of a comprehensive business continuity plan.

While the technologies and solutions used may be complex, all decisions are (or should be) driven by the answers to two questions asked about each of the major applications and data sets used by the business:

• How long can we afford to be without this application and access to this data?
• How much data can we afford to lose in a disaster?

Once the business stakeholders have agreed upon answers to those questions, choosing the solution required to deliver against the resulting targets is relatively easy. The full spectrum of technologies for IT disaster recovery and business continuity is mapped out in the chart below.

Downtime vs Data Loss

This graph illustrates an important distinction between the two main categories of solution:

• Tape-based solutions can only be relied upon to achieve recovery times of days, not hours.
• Replication-based solutions can achieve recovery times of hours or minutes, when properly implemented. When deployed with VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM), VMs can automatically be recovered (and DR testing perform non-disruptively).
  

The technologies and architectures used to achieve business continuity are discussed individually in the remainder of the Solutions section of this website. Talk to Data Engines | ENSTOR when you're ready to look at using them to build a plan for your business.