Business Continuity and Resilience
High Availability and Disaster Recovery is usually used interchangeably within organizations however, they have two separate functions. Organizations have just started to realize Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is essential for organizations in today's interconnected world. Once a business has outlined Service-level agreement (SLA) and Operational-level agreement (OLA) for business services, they have enough information to classify these service into categorizes of services depending on their SLA/OLA requirement. The next steps is to decide on system resiliency requirement for each categories.
Infrastructure cost and setup for High Availability to achieve has been a challenge for businesses and a number of options has been tried out over the years. These include on-premise hosted with RAID, hot swap of hardware components, redundancy for network, clustering technology etc etc. Later shared data-centers come about which reduced the cost to businesses at the same time shifted risks. Cloud services have consolidated these dispersed data-centers with better management and further reducing these costs to business. Cloud controller manager is the latest architecture to provide more resilience and highly available technology that can be scaled on demand. Technology has solved a lot of technical issues that had stopped businesses from achieving their High Availability requirements. However, a lot of organizations are still catching up to define their service SLA and OLA, define a benchmark for the services supplied to take full advantage of these new technologies. Data availability is much bigger than just having High Availability Infrastructure used to support for all services in a businesses. Some services may require 24x7 availability or just 8 to 5 working days. Data availability is the next stage of availability to become a challenge for organizations.
Disaster Recovery is planning for potential loss of services used by all divisions within an organization. It is one of the crucial item in the Business Continuity Plan that is an after thought by organizations. This is because the cost can not be easily justified on return on investment (ROI) for implementation. Latest technological advancement in High Availability architecture design allows for disaster recovery to be planned and implemented in conjunction that has been received positively by major of the organizations.
DataExperts can help your organization by analyzing and providing guidance on the best high availability solution as per organizational requirement.