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IT In Critical Business
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In today’s business world we're delegating to IT more responsibility for carrying out the day-to-day functions that keep our businesses, governments and schools working. Thus the importance and the value of IT have been raised till it reached almost the importance of the business itself. For instance, a vehicle, which is just a means of transportation, is so valuable as it carries human beings. Nowadays-out of the importance and value of IT-we use the new expression “Business Continuity”.
Definition:
The basic definition of Business Continuity is the ability of conducting business under any circumstances. From an IT standpoint, it is the ability to provide systems and data for business transactions to a set of service levels based on end to end availability, performance (such as response times), data security and integrity, and other factors. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) usually drive the Business Continuity design and budgets.
Major Business Continuity design components:
• Prevention Services.
• Recovery Services.
Let’s examine how businesses usually view these components.
Prevention Services:
Prevention Service is the ability to avoid outages or minimize down time.
• Data security; Implementing a data protection strategy; backup, archive or replicating data. The determine of protection procedure and technology is directly related to the planned recovery services mentioned below.
• High availability; Applying a NSPF (No Single Point of Failure) setup, build reliability and redundancy into systems infrastructure including hardware, software, networks, skills and services to eliminate single points of failure. It also includes some automatic switchover or restart capabilities to minimize down time.
• Continuous operations; Minimize data center operation impacts up time that includes hardware and software maintenance and changes, backup, systems management, speedy problem resolution, virus and spam attacks prevention, security measures, and so on.
Recovery services:
Recovery services are the ability to recover the system and data speedily in whole, partial or degraded modes when outages occur.
Here we should examine:
• Disaster Recovery; Evoked when primary operation site is no longer operable and the alter site is the only option.
• System component or operation recovery; Evoked when an individual component or groups of components fail, or when human errors occur. During operation service level agreements, the degrees of prevention, recovery services required and the budgets supporting them are known. Usually it is decision on risks; a balance between the avoidance costs and Business Continuity solutions investments.
Business Continuity levels:
In order to measure any organization's business from the Business Continuity point of view, you have to answer the following two questions;
How much can one afford to lose?
How much can one afford to pay?
There are many known techniques that are being used to achieve these seven BC levels, as mirroring, copying and clustering.
Posted by ROOT Technologies
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