Information is an organization’s most important asset. In today’s world, continuous access to information is a must for the smooth functioning of business operations. The cost of unavailability of information is greater than ever and outages in certain verticals like finance and banking can even cost millions of dollar per hour.
There are many threats to continuous information availability. For example natural disasters, unplanned occurrences and planned maintenance may result in information becoming unavailable, its critical for business to define appropriate strategies to overcome these situations. Business Continuity is an important process that involves defining and implementing these strategies.
Business Continuity is an integrated enterprise – wide process that includes all activities – internal and external to IT which a business must perform to mitigate the impact of planned and unplanned downtime.
Business Continuity entails preparing for, responding to, and recovering from any system outage that adversely affects business operations. It involves proactive measures, like business impact analysis, risk assessments and the deployment of Business Continuity technology solutions, such as backup and replication. It also involves reactive measures such as disaster recovery and restart to be invoked in the event of a failure.
The goal of a Business Continuity solution is to ensure the availability of information required to conduct vital business operations. In a virtualized environment, BC technology solutions need to protect both physical and virtual resources .Virtualization considerably simplifies the implementation of Business Continuity strategy and solutions.
Information Availability or IA refers to the ability of an IT infrastructure to function according to business expectations during its specified time of operation.
IA can be defined in terms of three characteristics of information:
- Accessibility – Information should be accessible to the right user when required.
- Reliability – Information should be reliable and correct in all aspects. It should be the same as what was stored and there is no alteration or corruption to the information.
- Timeliness – Timeliness defines the window such as a particular time of the day, week, month and year as specified, during which time, the information must be accessible.
Information unavailability or downtime can have serious negative results such as lost productivity, lost revenue, poor financial performance, damaged reputation, temporary employees, additional equipment rental, overtime, travel expenses and extra shipping.
