Disaster recovery planning incomplete without automation

Few enterprises relish planning or testing for business continuity. No one wants to think about all the terrible (or stupid) things that can happen which might cause an outage; but every business has to do so, and it is the specific responsibility of IT to assure systems can be brought back online efficiently and correctly if something does happen.

In planning for disaster recovery (DR), the IT staff must consider the costs and the complexity of bringing a whole range of applications back online. If not done properly or in the correct order or if mistakes are made during recovery due to lack of proper testing or documentation of the process, small outages can become true disasters. These concerns can be addressed through DR automation.

Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) automation tools should be implemented to manage the whole process, from failover operations to a remote site to automating the failback of IT operations to the primary site. These solutions can free IT staff from the many manual steps that can otherwise introduce risk into BCDR. When automated BCDR maps to an organization's operational model, it reduces recovery time, ensures successful failover and failback, and provides for testing without disruption to the business.

Clearly, automation can reduce the risk and complexity of BCDR, but it can also reduce the cost. For many companies, downtime equates with lost revenue. The Enterprise Strategy Group recently found that 73 percent of companies surveyed reported they could only tolerate about three hours of tier-one application downtime before revenue loss became critical. Data restoration performed with traditional backup software can be an extremely complex and lengthy process which typically far exceeds that tolerance level. By reducing dependency on tape-based recovery and leveraging new technologies such as DR automation, snapshots and continuous data protection, enterprises can ensure optimal uptime even when bad things happen -- without busting their budgets.

Christopher Poelker is the author of Storage Area Networks for Dummies, the vice president of enterprise solutions at FalconStor Software, and deputy commissioner of the TechAmerica Foundation Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD²).