Business Continuity – Business dependency on IT systems has never been greater, so when things go wrong the impact can be catastrophic. Whether it’s the CEO waiting for information as part of an acquisition negotiation, or the thousands of transactions that flow through the corporate website, any glitch in the IT infrastructure can wreak havoc with productivity, revenue and the organization’s reputation.
Yet despite the critical role of business applications the approach to keeping them up and running remains in the dark ages for many companies. In today’s competitive and budget-sensitive world nothing short of continuous availability is required for the most important applications.
What businesses need to demand, is a cost-effective continuous availability for the 21st century. One that is architected to focus on those applications that are most critical; to be flexible enough to fit into existing and future IT infrastructures; to deliver integrated high availability and disaster protection in a single solution; to enable accelerated performance over wide area networks; to provide unparalleled levels of automation and control, and to do all this with minimum configuration and within budget.
Crucially, these systems protect business critical applications against downtime. Often, they will integrate class leading replication technology with application monitoring and disaster recovery to deliver continuous availability meaning users are not disrupt when IT systems go down.
Business demands on IT change continuously. As new applications are introduce and existing configurations change, the high availability software must adapt. Automated discovery prevents configuration creep that could leave existing applications exposed. And the new systems coming to market offer a point and click interface to protect new and existing applications.
Many systems provide an intuitive interface enabling real time visibility and control of application availability with both local and remote protection options. Policies and rules determine exactly what should happen to protect critical services and automated. Or manual fail over options are available to meet business and IT needs.
The nature of IT systems is that at some point they will go wrong. External factors such as power interruptions may take entire data rooms down. Application failures will cause business processes to stop. Selective component failures may take individual machines down. SAN issues may disrupt physical or virtual clusters and entire sites are increasingly threaten by power issues and environmental disasters.
Continuous Availability solutions protect against all of these scenarios, and more. By taking a business centric approach it’s the only solution. That will keep users working even when multiple software applications go down. The systems are design to concentrate on the user experience and keep them working when IT outages are unavoidable. They integrate local high availability and remote disaster protection into one seamless solution to provide business continuity. This ensures critical applications remain available through unplanned IT downtime as well as enabling planned maintenance without disruption.