Business Continuity and Resilience
High Availability and Disaster Recovery are usually used interchangeably within organizations however, they have two separate functions. Organizations have just started to realize the 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 this service into categories of services depending on their SLA/OLA requirement. The next step is to decide on system resiliency requirement for each category.
Infrastructure cost and setup for High Availability to achieve has been a challenge for businesses and several options have been tried out over the years. These include on-premises hosted with RAID, hot swap of hardware components, redundancy for network, clustering technology etc etc. Later shared datacenters come about which reduced the cost to businesses at the same time shifted risks. Cloud services have consolidated these dispersed datacenters with better management and further reducing these costs to business. Cloud providers are the latest architecture to provide more resilience and universally available technology that can be scaled on demand. Technology has solved a lot of technical issues that have 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 modern technologies. Data availability is much bigger than just having High Availability Infrastructure used to support all services in a business. 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 items in the Business Continuity Plan that is an afterthought by organizations. This is because the cost cannot be easily justified on return on investment (ROI) for implementation. The 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.