Emerging technologies - the future of business continuity

Keith Tilley gives a brief overview of technology trends for 2004 which will have an impact on the business continuity industry.

In these times of always-on communication, you expect to pick up the phone and hear a dial tone. If you don’t there’s clearly a problem, so you use your mobile phone to report the fault. The point is, you have a contingency plan.

So if that’s the case, why should it be acceptable, in this day and age, to switch on your PC and find that you can’t access your customer database? Or for the file you were working on during your flight back to New York to disappear without a trace when you come to transfer it to your office network?

Emerging technical developments – not just in IT, but in voice and communications – are continually driving the business continuity industry to come up with ever more sophisticated solutions to ensure that contingency plans are available for every facet of the business. As 2004 looks set to be a year of recovery for the IT industry as a whole, it seems reasonable to expect that companies will be investing in new technologies, and will require appropriate continuity services to reflect changes. This is what is driving the development of new solutions in the information availability market – as opposed to developments in the market per se.

IT
The vastly increasing volumes of data being held on mobile devices create more challenges for the business continuity manager as environments become ever more distributed. You only have to look around you at a train station or airport to discover that most business people own at least one of the following – mobile phone, PDA or laptop – and usually all three.

For the business continuity manager, that leads to a need for a revised backup policy, so that data on the move can be recovered in the same way as data stored on servers in an office. An automated system is better, since mobile users may forget or might simply not have the time to manually backup data themselves.

Blade servers and the future trends towards utility, or grid, computing will also create problems for the business continuity manager in terms of the sheer power needed. It will be up to the providers to ensure that their services are up to the job.

Voice
Voice recovery is becoming as important as data recovery for the business. After all, the call (or contact) centre is often the most important interface between your organisation and your customers. In today’s time-deprived society customers will go elsewhere if they do not get an instant answer – whether it’s from a credit card company, insurance provider or low-cost airline. You must be visible to those customers, so business continuity which stops at data is rapidly becoming half a solution.

This is driving companies to develop more sophisticated ways of recovering voice. From a SunGard Availability Services point of view, this includes the ability for direct dial numbers to be made available at a SunGard site, and for more than one customer to be recovered quickly and effectively at a single facility – just in case customers are worried that a new invocation might cause the original incumbent to be turfed out.

Comms
Business continuity providers are also being required to run ever more sophisticated network infrastructure, so that their customers’ data can be recovered to almost anywhere in the world via high-speed fibre links. That enables a reduction in the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) – the time and extent to which information needs to be recovered. For a bank where seconds of downtime could cost millions, this is an essential service, especially in the light of regulations such as Basel II and the UK FSA guidelines, due to come into force over the next two years for all financial services firms. Add to that other developments such as PAS 56, the Civil Contingencies Bill and Sarbanes Oxley and it becomes clear that business continuity practice can be of practical and tangible value to organisations of all sectors and size when it comes to ensuring their information availability.

The five-year plan
Over the next five years, these elements will combine to provide true enterprise continuity and the ability to immediately recover from a disaster.

Whenever you switch on a PC, laptop or PDA – or simply pick up the phone – you should be able to get a ‘dial tone’ for your business, regardless of hardware and software failures, power outages or vagaries of the weather.

The technologies are available – but it’s up to the business continuity providers to drive their development and for the business continuity (or other manager tasked with maintaining information availability) to make use of them.

Keith Tilley is UK MD at SunGard Availability Services.

For more information contact 0800 142 413, infoavail@sungard.com or visit www.availability.sungard.com

•Date: 12th December 2003 •Region: UK/Worldwide•Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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