Letter to the editor… Dear editor, Disaster recovery solutions should be flexible, scalable and affordable delivering business value as well as adapting rapidly to evolving business needs. However, the majority of DR solutions in place today are not only consuming excessive amounts of the IT budget but their inherent inflexibility results in vendor lock in and an inability to respond to business change. Piecemeal solutions are expensive, incompatible and demand a massive management overhead. Many businesses continue to cite cost and complexity as the key reasons for avoiding disaster recovery investment. Most organisations have evolved highly convoluted solutions based on multiple products, from disk copies and tape back up to replication, to address the diverse disaster recovery requirements. Unfortunately these solutions are not integrated; they are exorbitantly expensive to manage, and, critically, in the event of changing business risk or regulation, moving from one solution to another is massively complex, expensive and time consuming. Organisations simply cannot afford to continue their piecemeal approach to disaster recovery planning. Instead they need an integrated solution that supports a variety of DR needs – from replication to continuous data protection. One integrated solution that can be managed centrally is far more cost effective and, critically, responsive to business change. By avoiding storage vendor tie in, organisations can leverage appropriate levels of storage – and evolve towards tiered storage if required. There is no value in inflexible, inconsistent disaster recovery solutions – and those organisations unable to respond fast to business change or appetite for risk need to look hard at their DR strategy and reflect on whether it is actually increasing, rather than diminishing, business risk. Yours sincerely, Sebastian Darrington Reader response To the Editor and Sebastian Darrington, Your letter was well done in regard to the complexity of the various disaster recovery solutions being offered. However, I think the underlying concern should be addressed by a question to the business as to what controls are in place to standardize platforms used in support of the business. For example, are your applications written in-house or are they primarily purchased packages, or a combination of both? Do you use a Mainframe, Windows servers, HP, IBM, SUN, and/or Linux platform? How many storage vendors are you working with? Have you settled on one backup strategy? If, as with many companies, you utilize numerous vendors and suppliers so that you can leverage them against each other to reduce costs, but you then proliferate multiple technologies within your data center, you are only adding to the complexities of the disaster recovery / business continuity solutions required to support the business enterprise. Be sure that you are reviewing business practices as they apply to simplification, standardization and consolidation before you put too much blame on the people who are trying to find solutions for keeping all the diverse infrastructure up and running and in sync when a disaster occurs. Bill Marotz, CBCP, MRP
•Date: 28th March 2006• Region: UK • Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity |
