What is business continuityIn an IT context, business continuity is the capability of your enterprise to stay online and deliver products and services during disruptive events, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks and communication failures. Show The core of this concept is the business continuity plan — a defined strategy that includes every facet of your organization and details procedures for maintaining business availability. Start with a business continuity planBusiness continuity management starts with planning how to maintain your critical functions (e.g., IT, sales and support) during and after a disruption. A business continuity plan (BCP) should comprise the following element 1. Threat Analysis The identification of potential disruptions, along with potential damage they can cause to affected resources. Examples include:
2. Role assignment Every organization needs a well-defined chain of command and substitute plan to deal with absence of staff in a crisis scenario. Employees must be cross-trained on their responsibilities so as to be able to fill in for one another. Internal departments (e.g., marketing, IT, human resources) should be broken down into teams based on their skills and responsibilities. Team leaders can then assign roles and duties to individuals according to your organization’s threat analysis. 3. Communications A communications strategy details how information is disseminated immediately following and during a disruptive event, as well as after it has been resolved. Your strategy should include:
4. Backups From electrical power to communications and data, every critical business component must have an adequate backup plan that includes:
Load balancing business continuityLoad balancing maintains business continuity by distributing incoming requests across multiple backend servers in your data center. This provides redundancy in the event of a server failure, ensuring continuous application uptime. In contrast to the reactive measures used in failover and disaster recovery (described below) load balancing is a preventative measure. Health monitoring tracks server availability, ensuring accurate load distribution at all times—including during disruptive events. Disaster recovery plan (DCP) – Your second line of defenseEven the most carefully thought out business continuity plan is never completely foolproof. Despite your best efforts, some disasters simply cannot be mitigated. A disaster recovery plan (DCP) is a second line of defense that enables you to bounce back from the worst disruptions with minimal damage. As the name implies, a disaster recovery plan deals with the restoration of operations after a major disruption. It’s defined by two factors: RTO and RPO.
Deciding on specific RTOs and RPOs helps clearly show the technical solutions needed to achieve your recovery goals. In most cases the decision is going to boil down to choosing the right failover solution. Choosing the right failover solutionsFailover is the switching between primary and backup systems in the event of failure, outage or downtime. It’s the key component of your disaster recovery and business continuity plans. A failover system should address both RTO and RPO goals by keeping backup infrastructure and data at the ready. Ideally, your failover solution should seamlessly kick in to insulate end users from any service degradation. When choosing a solution, the two most important aspects to consider are its technological prowess and its service level agreement (SLA). The latter is often a reflection of the former. For an IT organization charged with the business continuity of a website or web application, there are three failover options:
|