Paddy Falls, CTO, Neverfail (below) looks at effective strategies for business continuity For any business continuity plan to be effective, businesses should follow fundamental processes to ensure that the cornerstones of continuity are being firmly dealt with.

One of the initial continuity considerations from an IT perspective is the basic need to back up a deluge of data. In an era where information has become a business’s most valuable asset, back-ups can no longer be just a safety repository, but instead have become a relied-upon method of recovering critical data in the event of a failure. As businesses enter a virtual world, the ability to encapsulate an entire workload (the OS, applications and data) into an independent set of files has allowed back-up technology to evolve and recovery times to improve. The recent boom in cloud computing has also resulted in more small and medium enterprises turning to cloud-based services in an attempt to save capital and reduce overheads.

Once data has been saved and replicated, moving it to an offsite storage location is often the next step to make a continuity plan more robust. Offsite storage offers a secure way of storing and retrieving data during a disaster or periods of downtime. While it may make sense to own a secondary site, it may be more practical to use a secondary storage site that is hosted by a co-location provider, leveraging shared resources for economical gains.

However, backing up data cannot be the only focus of a business continuity plan, as restoring from a back-up can lead to periods of downtime that risk the operation, and even the reputation, of the business.  Therefore additional methods should be taken to ensure operations continue throughout disruptions by coupling back-up technologies with a High Availability (HA) strategy. HA serves the day-to-day needs of end users to ensure they are able to continue working during a system interruption, building out a level of resilience to the infrastructure’s critical processes.

It is important that businesses prioritise their applications to determine which processes are invaluable to the organisation, and as such, which need continuous availability. Once identified, steps can be taken to ensure these mission-critical applications become resilient to failure via granular offerings designed to protect them from downtime.

A HA strategy allows for nearly 100 percent uptime of systems, creating business resiliency and helping to eradicate single points of failure. Through the use of replication technology, clustered servers, disk arrays, storage area networks and offsite locations, HA creates duplicated servers which can be automatically failed over to during an interruption. It is also possible to efficiently switch back applications to the in-house environment once the initial disturbance is rectified.

These basic cornerstones should provide a business with an effective IT continuity plan, dramatically enhancing application resilience, while also ensuring that there is a coherent and comprehensive audit trail. Without these elements, recovering from an IT outage can be problematic and could cause data to be lost or applications to be unrecoverable. When an IT outage occurs, it is vital that applications and data are restored as quickly as possible. By following these basic principles, businesses can manage the recovery process so service operations are unaffected by sudden interruptions.