| Moving towards an interactive approach
It’s widely accepted that the business continuity industry no longer has a simply reactive ‘disaster recovery’ function, but has become far more proactive, however I would argue that reactive and proactive are no longer terms that should be used in isolation to describe the business continuity industry. Instead, contingency planners need also to take an interactive approach – involving high availability solutions and meeting the need for always-on access to business-critical data. As our reliance on technology increases, this proactive/reactive/interactive approach is what we call ‘information availability’ – the process of keeping people and information connected within the timescales and at the functional concurrency required by the business. Disaster recovery = reactive However, around 1995/6, restore times actually began to increase due to the sheer volume of information that needed to be retained in the organisation and recovered in the event of an interruption. The affordability of network computing combined with a more sophisticated user base led to new modes of deploying technology, with resultant implications for recovery requirements and restore times. Traditional disaster recovery methods were no longer an adequate solution – in many cases restore times were lengthening for key platforms – and did not offer the protection that the increasing volume of information required. More complex needs were identified and the only way to improve restore times now was to look at alternative methods for timely restoration of mission critical systems. Business continuity = proactive The proactive process of business continuity management began to be taken more seriously. The value of conducting a business impact analysis and risk assessment as a means of understanding, identifying and prioritising business and technology functions made sense. Now organisations could set recovery parameters and restore times according to the actual needs of the business and criticality of information. People realised that just because they had a lot of information, this didn’t mean that it was all needed at once. Instead of the reactive IT-centric ‘as-long-as-it-gets-quicker-year-on-year-no-matter-what-I-do’ approach, a more strategic approach in keeping with new ways of using (and abusing) technology emerged. In order for the industry to remain both time and cost-effective, the reactive approach – by necessity – become proactive. The Bank of England and Cadbury may have provided guidance for accounting and financial systems in the 80s and early 90s, but the past ten years (and especially since 9/11) have seen a whole host of new regulatory and compliance issues emerge. From Turnbull to Basel II, many industry regulators are now insisting that organisations put in place business continuity plans as standard practice – and these demands are not just focussed upon the financial sector. Business continuity providers are not the only ones to benefit from this shift. The storage vendors are getting in on the act, and selling on the basis of failover facilities. The need to proactively protect systems and the functions dependent upon them is now well recognised and an acknowledgement that the way in which we use technology has changed. Information availability = interactive Regardless of the industry that you work in, technology is the backbone to it – the means to the end. As that dependence on technology increases, we are no longer able to do jobs manually – even in an emergency. So we need to reduce (even better, eliminate) single points of failure, and mirror our systems so that the failure of one does not impact our ability to carry on business as usual. This is even more critical as many businesses move towards a just-in-time model, as a more efficient and cost-effectively model. However, increased efficiencies and economies of scale mean that more things can go wrong with associated impacts. We’re creating a rod for our own back, and we can’t possibly proactively plan for every eventuality, especially when we rely heavily on others in the supply chain. And as the cliché rightly has it – any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And that doesn’t have to be the traditional manufacturing supply chain. It could be your telco provider – as those organisations affected by the BT tunnel fire in Manchester earlier this year would testify. It could be your utilities supplier, or even the emergency services. All of these providers will be required by the UK Civil Contingencies Bill to put in place their own continuity plans – but many of them have a long way to go yet. Technology has, and is, driving the move from reactive to proactive to interactive. Information availability is a combination of previous practices and new developments, and requires a big undertaking. Not only at time of disaster (reactive) and before a disaster (proactive) but all the time (interactive). And when the goal moves from business recovery to keeping processes continuous and live, no matter what happens – such as that found in production environments – the interactive approach comes into its own. Interactive measures are founded upon a strong partnership between provider and customer, and may involve managed services and hosted solutions (backed up by SLAs) to deliver the high availability and zero-downtime required. It is my belief that demand for continuity
solutions that adopt proactive, reactive and interactive measures
combined will grow. I also feel that percentage increases for proactive
and interactive solutions will be higher than for the reactive,
as businesses By default, our industry has to demonstrate
the ability to offer this full range of services – which SunGard
calls the ‘information availability continuum’ –
and which reflects the fact that we offer everything along the reactive,
proactive and interactive spectrum. For more information:
•Date:
6th August 2004 •Region:UK/ World •Type:
Article •Topic: IT
continuity |
