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 The
provision of disaster related fail-over facilities has been the
foundation upon which most of the main specialist business continuity
service companies have built their businesses. However these are
changing times for this market. ICM, the current UK ‘Business
Continuity Provider of the Year’, is one of the UK’s
main recovery facilities providers and its operations director,
Mike Osborne, has provided Continuity Central with a list of the
industry developments that he is seeing:
Continuity rather than disaster recovery
led invocations
There is a trend towards more frequent but shorter invocations.
Businesses are starting to use their ‘disaster recovery’
facility provision to solve production and service delivery problems
rather than waiting for a full-scale disaster before invoking. This
means that the recovery facility is seen much more as a day-to-day
extension of a company’s business continuity management activities,
rather than just as a last-resort disaster recovery solution. Many
invocations are now lasting from just a few hours to a day. Some
companies are changing their planning to focus, not so much on the
occasional one-off major crisis, but on the 99 percent of ‘normal’
disruptions to operational continuity with a view that continuity
provides an ‘always on’ solution that will also cover
disasters.
Increased demand for high availability
With this always on view of continuity in mind, recovery facilities
are increasingly becoming high availability based rather than being
the hot, warm or cold sites of old. This is creating demand for
the on-line hosting of servers within recovery facility locations
for data replication and application failover purposes. Whilst data
can be moved at the speed of light, total high availability also
results in people issues coming to the fore:
Companies are starting to take the personal
needs of their staff much more into account when selecting recovery
facilities. They are considering such things as:
- Location: an hour’s travelling time from the normal
production site is becoming the maximum normally considered for
the location of the recovery facility. This ensures that staff don’t
need to make unpopular, and expensive, overnight stays and means
that normal child-care and family arrangements don’t need
to be disrupted. Additionally, staff travelling times are increasingly
becoming a limiting factor in the recovery time objective. Data
failover systems mean that, should an invocation occur, staff are
no longer sat around at recovery centres waiting for data tapes
to arrive from a remote storage facility.
- Environment: the comfort of staff
is being taken more into account, with recovery facilities mirroring
as far as possible the usual working environment. Even the very
choice of recovery provider could now be decided on which available
fail-over site is more conducive to staff, particularly now that
the technology of continuity is assumed as being well established.
- Services: no longer is it acceptable that the bare bones
of a desk, chair and analogue telephone be provided. Instant ACD,
Internet and e-mail are the corner stones of a viable continuity
plan. In line with financial regulatory requirements, ICM is finding
that clients are starting to request facilities for recording voice
calls at recovery facilities.
In-house recovery facilities
With ‘always on’ at the forefront of continuity thinking
and with proven technology from the major IT manufacturers readily
available, there is a definite trend emerging to take recovery facility
provision in-house. This gives companies more control over invocations
that relate to the core applications that cannot withstand even
the smallest amount of down-time. ICM sees this as an opportunity
rather than a threat. Many companies using in-house recovery facilities
contract for the design and supply, or return to service options
provided by sister companies with the ICM Group stable, whilst ICM
Recovery itself supplies ship-in and mobile recovery facilities
to provide extra on-site support during invocations and tests. ICM
can also act as a recovery centre construction company – helping
clients build their own facilities using ICM’s experience
and expertise.
The challenges of convergence
With IT and people well catered for, perhaps the final piece of
the continuity puzzle of the future will be the convergence of telecoms
and information technology. These are increasingly being built as
one inseparable infrastructure. Communications systems are now as
mission critical as computing systems are for most businesses.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) will be
a technology of increasing importance in 2004. The demand is not
mainstream yet but undoubtedly will be. ICM is anticipating this
by ensuring that all telephony systems used in recovery centres
can be enabled for VoIP.
The five-year itch
2004 should be an interesting year for the recovery facility market.
Many contracts tend to be signed on a five-year basis and Y2K issues
saw a lot of new contracts being signed in 1999. These will be up
for renewal in 2004. Many subscribers faced a Hobson’s Choice
of ‘sign or risk going without’ on the run-up to Y2K
and consequently the existing contract holders will have to compete
hard to retain these legacy high-priced contracts and, where their
clients elect to test the market, will certainly not be able to
maintain the same price per seat that they were able to obtain in
those heady days.
Indeed, since those heady days, we have seen
many major names disappear through industry consolidation. Needless
to say that if we are to see the existing providers evolve and flourish
in the challenge of the future of business continuity, they will
need to meet some of the points raised by ICM. It will be an interesting
2004 for the continuity industry.
www.icm-computer.co.uk
•Date:
23rd December 2003 •Region: UK •Type:
Article •Topic: Recovery
facilities
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