Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity (BC) ensures that an organization can continue (or restart) operations after service interruptions due to serious incidents, issues, or disasters. Typical disasters include unexpected natural disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, or also unnatural incidents, like terrorist attacks.

As defined on Disaster Recovery Journal website (https://www.drj.com/) states that:

"A disaster is a sudden, unplanned calamitous event that brings about great damage or loss. Any event that creates an inability on the organization's part to provide the critical business functions for some undetermined period of time."

But you also have to consider accidents by key personnel in the business, server crashes, and security breaches. All these can impact the business from the infrastructure level to the application and...

BC concepts

BC is a process, so there will be a full life cycle, with some periodical iterations and improvements. BC planning or BC and resiliency planning is the process of defining solutions to prevent and recover from potential issues or threats related to business operativity and functionality. The result of this process is typically the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that recognizes potential risks and provides a way to mitigate them.

The BCP life cycle is like other flows—starts from an analysis, follows with a solution design, the implementation, testing and validation and a maintenance phase, as described in the following figure:

Business continuity planning lifecycle

Business continuity includes at least three following key elements:

• Resilience: All critical business functions and the supporting infrastructure must be designed with the right specific solution...

Disaster recovery (DR)

A disaster is any event that halts business activity on a large scale. In most cases, we are thinking about natural disasters, but there are also man-made disasters and all of them can happen at any time without warning. Technologies and all IT services could be impacted by these kinds of disasters. Of course, there are other and more important aspects; like human life that can also be at risk, but for BC, we put the main focus on the business-critical services and applications.

DR provides BC in the event of a disaster, and may be just localized on equipment (like a single server) or globally on an entire site. Business will be recovered by following a specific DR plan; it is just a subset of the BCP. In the worst case of a disaster that impacts an entire site or region, usually, the recovery process uses a remote location called a disaster recovery site...

VMware solutions

In the past, BC was the first driver of virtualization initiative; virtualization not only helps in server consolidation and in driving down costs across IT organizations, but can also improve availability, resiliency, and recoverability for business-critical applications and services.

There are three key features of virtualization that lead to better-managed BC:

• Consolidation: Server consolidation means doing more with less. You're reducing your physical footprint, which also means you can streamline your DR plans and standardize your recovery process.
• Hardware independence: This means being able to recover onto any x86 hardware. So, you have the flexibility to buy different servers for your recovery site, or even fewer servers. Continuing to virtualize your production site will free up additional machines that can then be moved over to your recovery...

Summary

BC and DR are at the top of IT and data center initiatives; usually, improving BC and DR capabilities is the top priority for SMBs and one of the first for an enterprise.

This chapter has described what's behind the normal operation and maintenance, in order to define your BC requirements and match your expected services levels.

Availability, SLA, data and system protection, DR, and other basics concepts were described in this chapter, with a brief introduction to SRM and SR as a solution for DR.

In this chapter, we have introduced some BC concepts, availability, and DR metrics and the differences between availability and DR.

In the next chapters, we will give more details on availability and data protection solutions.