Business Continuity is about ensuring businesses continue to run even in the event of a major disaster. This includes planning for availability of people, processes, and infrastructure, typically at reduced levels of operation. Disaster Recovery (DR) is a part of business continuity planning that deals specifically with restoring IT systems, including data, critical software and hardware to run the business.
By Srinivasan Chandrasekar
The recent Chennai floods brought to sharp focus the importance of planning for Business Continuity, irrespective of business size. In the aftermath of the floods, apart from direct financial losses amounting to several thousand crores, several businesses are now likely to never reopen due to loss of critical data and being out of business for an extended period of time. The scary thing, however, is that this is not an isolated occurrence. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), says that 40% of companies hit by a major disaster never reopen for business. It is clear that planning for business continuity is not a choice; it is a necessity.
Significance of Disaster Recovery Management
Business Continuity is about ensuring businesses continue to run even in the event of a major disaster. This includes planning for availability of people, processes, and infrastructure, typically at reduced levels of operation. Disaster Recovery (DR) is a part of business continuity planning that deals specifically with restoring IT systems, including data, critical software and hardware to run the business.
DR solutions are measured using two key metrics. The first is Recovery Point Objective (RPO) which refers to the amount of data that gets lost due to the disaster. It is measured in units of time. For example, an RPO of 2 minutes indicates that the last 2 minutes of data generated prior to the disruption got irretrievably lost. The second metric is Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which refers to the amount of time it takes for data and applications to become available and for operations to resume post disruption. In today’s highly competitive environment, a modern DR solution needs to offer a RPO of a few seconds to a few minutes, and a RTO of a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the criticality of the data and applications in question.
Interestingly, according to a report released by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council in 2014, three out of four companies are not adequately prepared to deal with disasters. The most commonly cited reasons for this are cost and complexity of DR solutions. By the time organizations add up the costs of DR software, System Integrator services for deployment and custom development, additional servers, storage, bandwidth, and space in secondary data centers, they will be looking at upwards of millions of dollars. This often results in customers using arcane solutions with large RPOs and RTOs, resulting in inadequate preparedness.
The Power of Public Cloud
This scenario is about to change in a big way because of the public cloud. Firstly, instead of investing millions of dollars in secondary data centers, businesses can simply use the public cloud to keep their infrastructure running even in the event of a disaster. Second, the ‘Pay-as-you-go model’ of the public cloud dramatically reduces the cost structure of DR. Lastly, with DR technologies being offered in a “Software-as-a-Service” model, thereby further reducing the cost and the complexity of deploying DR, we believe that it is only a matter of time before DR becomes as commonly used as backup in businesses of all sizes.
We are already seeing several companies take the lead in ensuring they are well protected in the event of a disaster at a fraction of what it used to cost earlier. Take for example, WorkItsafe, a New York–based IT services firm that provides a range of technology solutions and services for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy, the deadliest hurricane in the northeastern U.S. in 40 years and the second-costliest in the nation’s history devastated the east coast of the U.S., thanks to the DR plan that WorkITsafe had set up, it was able to redirect customers from connecting to their normal customer-premises servers to replica servers running in the WorkITsafe data center. This enabled those businesses to continue to operate by letting employees access business applications from home.
Pantaenius, a Germany–based insurance provider that specializes in yacht and corporate Insurance, is another example of a company that has taken appropriate precautions against disasters. Pantaenius replicates all of its company’s production workloads, including all Microsoft business applications and financial line-of-business applications to an Azure data center. If Pantaenius loses a single server or its entire datacenter, it can activate the Azure servers in minutes so that employees can continue working, either from home or another location. But for the public cloud, Pantaenius would have had to spend more than $160,000 building a secondary data server.
Disasters and outages are a fact of life. All that any company can do is be prepared. With the emergence of the public cloud as an alternate Data Center and cost effective DR solutions in the market, there is absolutely no reason any company should be ill prepared to face nature’s vicissitudes.
The author is Director, Program Management, Microsoft India R & D Pvt Ltd.
