Continuity In An Uncertain World

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Definitions – Setting the ContextIn discussions with business people and Disaster Recovery experts, it became apparentthat many people confuse the various terms that relate to business continuity.It is necessary, before discussing a Disaster Recovery plan, to define some terms thatrelate to the space. The following are definitions developed from Wikipedia entries.Business ContinuityBusiness Continuity (BC) is the activity performed by an organization toensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers,regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. Theseactivities include many daily chores such as project management, system backups,change control, and help desk. Business continuity is not something implementedat the time of a disaster; Business Continuity refers to those activities performeddaily to maintain service, consistency, and recoverability.Disaster RecoveryDisaster Recovery (DR) refers to the process, policies and procedures relatedto preparing for recovery or continued operation of technology infrastructurecritical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disasterrecovery is a subset of Business Continuity. While business continuity involvesplanning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning in the midst ofdisruptive events, Disaster Recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems thatsupport business functions.High AvailabilityHigh Availability (HA) is a system design approach and associated serviceimplementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance willbe met during a contractual measurement period. Setting up a High Availabilityenvironment seeks to mitigate the need for Disaster Recovery; if systems arearchitected to be highly available, they are less likely to fail in the event of anatural or man-made disaster.Disaster Recovery—Continuity in an Uncertain World 3© Diversity Limited, 2011 Non-commercial reuse with attribution permitted
Disaster Recovery Does Not Equal HighAvailabilityIt is important to reiterate the distinction between High Availability (HA) andDisaster Recovery (DR). HA’s focus is targeted to ensuring minimal interruptionsand therefore involves a lot of activity around replication, redundancy andautomated processes to manage the two.DR on the other hand relates to the timely recovery of data and processesfollowing an incident. The time to recovery will vary depending on the type ofdata and the situation and hence DR will include a broad range of approaches,typically involving some mix of automated preparation for and manualintervention during an incident.Cloud Computing with its economies of scale, speed and agility is well suited toDisaster Recovery functions and anecdotal evidence suggests that DR is one areathat organizations are looking to move rapidly to the Cloud.Disaster Recovery—Continuity in an Uncertain World 4© Diversity Limited, 2011 Non-commercial reuse with attribution permitted
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Page 12 and 13: Don’t Forget the PeopleAny Disast
Page 14 and 15: ConclusionLike many things in life
Page 16 and 17: About RackspaceRackspace® Hosting

Continuity In An Uncertain World

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