Whitepaper 2015

THE TECHNICAL
FOUNDATIONS OF
BUSINESS RESILIENCE
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Building Resilience into Your Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Start with Hosting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Make People and Desktops as Critical as Servers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Simplify Storage and Backups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Don’t Overlook Network Redundancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Partner with Experts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Implementing a Business Resilience Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Audit Your Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Benchmark Your Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Document Your Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Conclusion: Be Proactive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 3 3

INTRODUCTION

It’s late August in the sweltering Florida crisis management, and more. The BCDR
Panhandle. Hurricane season is fast transformation reflects the changing
approaching, and few people are sweating it demands for ongoing performance in a
out more than the IT crisis teams hunkered mobile virtual world. It also recognizes that
down in their cool air-conditioned conference contemporary data centers are a complex
rooms, their faces glued to The Weather assortment of heterogeneous servers and
Channel. These pros must prepare for and global networks as well as email, desktop
respond to wave after wave of potential applications, databases, and web servers.
disasters to keep their mission-critical data BCDR is a multifaceted challenge, and that
centers up and running. IT crisis team in the Florida Panhandle, like
scores of other teams around the world,
It’s an unenviable task, to be sure, and one requires a diverse set of skills, processes,
that has changed quite a bit over the years. and technology to do its job successfully.
Back when business continuity and disaster
recovery (BCDR) became a non-negotiable The stakes are higher now, too. According to
requirement in the world of corporate IT, the studies by Emerson Network Power and the
primary focus of an IT crisis team might have Ponemon Institute,1 in a two-year period:
been to make tape backups and perform
• Some 91 percent of companies
restores.
experienced an unplanned data
Today, the BCDR mandate is all about center outage
business resilience: taking a strategic, • During an unplanned data center
proactive, multidisciplinary perspective outage, companies lost $7,900 per
to sustaining the availability of critical IT minute, up 41 percent from 2010
services in the face of all sorts of technology • $901,500—that’s the average cost
and nontechnology disruptions. of a total data center outage

Business resilience encompasses 1 The Lowdown on Data Center Downtime,” available at

everything from basic business continuity http://www.emersonnetworkpower.com/en-US/Solutions/
to security, high-level risk management, ByApplication/DataCenterNetworking/Data-Center-Insights/
Pages/Causes_of_Downtime_Study.aspx
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 4 4

BUILDING RESILIENCE
INTO YOUR BUSINESS

Increasing business complexity—more protect, preserve, and sustain the data and
markets, more products, more services— applications running on those servers. The
translates into a significantly greater reliance same holds true for networked storage.
on IT to keep organizations running at peak
efficiency. IT is the differentiator, enabling Your business resilience strategy should
entirely new classes of virtual products and feature a hosting partner that can act as the
services backed by responsive customer second location of your IT operations. The
support and driving marketing programs hosting partner should be able to support
and initiatives that were unthinkable even your complete range of platforms and
five years ago. And IT is the foundation for operating systems and provide all important
business intelligence and analytics that make capabilities: redundancy and failover
organizations smarter and more agile. architectures, backup networks, and more.

But this IT-dependent structure also Be sure to evaluate the partner’s security
means businesses are more vulnerable to from all perspectives—from network
disruptions, from hurricanes to hackers. The perimeter to physical security of the hosting
stakes are higher, but so are the advantages facilities. Consider how your needs or plans
for organizations that can design business may evolve in the short term and long term,
resilience into their operations. and ensure your partner is able to support
those plans.
So how can your organization raise its game
and transition from mere business continuity MAKE PEOPLE AND DESKTOPS AS
to true business resilience? CRITICAL AS SERVERS
Unquestionably, the high-performance
START WITH HOSTING
servers and databases that store and process
Naturally, servers are the heart of any IT essential data for business-critical services
operation, which means business resilience in the data center are the irreplaceable
plans must start with strategies that lifeblood of almost every sizable company.
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 5 5

BUILDING RESILIENCE At the same time, it’s equally true that cooling, and floor space, the cost of moving
traditional desktop productivity applications desktops to the data center can quickly
INTO YOUR BUSINESS and data (spreadsheets, documents, email become prohibitive.
(CONTINUED)
clients, and presentations) are indispensable
components of the daily workflow. Cloud-based solutions such as NaviSite’s
NaviCloud Desktop as a Service are emerging
Traditional business continuity strategies as a popular alternative to VDI approaches.
have emphasized the importance of restoring By moving desktops to the cloud rather
servers and centralized databases—at the than an internally deployed and managed
expense of giving users access to their vital data center, businesses can realize all the
desktop apps and data. promised benefits of virtual desktops—
centralized management, improved data
Restoring access to desktops, and security, and simplified deployment—
specifically to data and applications, is an without VDI’s costs, challenges, limitations,
essential component of business resilience. or hassles.
For instance, during hurricane season, when
employees are working from home after a SIMPLIFY STORAGE AND BACKUPS
storm hits, they need to get to their apps and
Without question, in the new world of Big
data.
Data, the need for storage is only increasing
Desktop virtualization solutions separate as companies strive to capture, access,
the applications and data from the actual and share data of all types. Around the
user device, so as the IT team restores world, companies are amassing petabytes
the data center, it simultaneously restores of data every day—data that can play an
the desktops of thousands of users who increasingly important role in company
can subsequently log in from their remote operations and business strategies. What’s
locations via just about any device and more, a growing pile of continually changing
access their own apps and data. regulations governs retention of and access
to that data to ensure privacy, legal access
Many enterprises have explored virtual (e.g., discovery), and more.
desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions:
centralizing access to virtual desktops from In a resilient business, it’s essential that
virtual machines in corporate data center employees and customers have the ability
servers. Although this can be less expensive to continually access data and resume its
than fleets of physical computers, companies usage as soon as possible in the wake of an
frequently find themselves spending much unplanned disruption. This need necessitates
more than originally anticipated: the upfront an exponential increase in storage
CapEx required to deploy a VDI can be infrastructure and creates corresponding
tremendous. To illustrate, simply moving hard challenges for business resilience.
drives from the desktop to the data center
Despite its low-cost profile, tape has
can potentially increase storage costs more
largely been retired as a primary means
than one hundred times. When combined
for backing up data, as it is slow, prone
with compute density challenges and
to failure, and difficult to restore. By
increased data center expenses for power,
contrast, disk-based backup and recovery
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 6 6

BUILDING RESILIENCE architectures provide exceptional levels of your uptime performance, even in the face
flexibility, agility, and cost effectiveness. of wide-scale disruptions. A private network
INTO YOUR BUSINESS Rapid-interval snapshots—ten- to fifteen- that provides Ethernet-based connectivity is
(CONTINUED)
minute transmissions of “deltas” (changes the most viable option for more bandwidth,
to data)—minimize backup traffic on the lower infrastructure costs, scalability,
network, dramatically reducing the potential and simplicity. Ethernet also provides a
data loss in the event of an unplanned cost-effective way to manage connections
disruption and providing near immediate for data archiving, preserve transaction
restores. Local-disk snapshots can speed up integrity, and strengthen business continuity.
that process even more.
A carrier-grade network also offers regional
With disk-based backups, companies ring networks: reliable, scalable, and
can restore data and services faster completely redundant fiber networks that
and greatly reduce the risk of data loss. use innovative transport technologies.
Scalable backup solutions are mandatory
for environments where data volumes are PARTNER WITH EXPERTS
constantly increasing. Finding a solution that In the past, when evaluating and selecting
scales to meet the needs of the business partners for basic business continuity and
without requiring major upgrades or capital disaster recovery, it wasn’t an unreasonable
investments is key. The safety and security strategy to carefully scrutinize every
of disk-based backups are also superior technical feature and specification.
when compared to the many limitations tape Questions largely revolved around which
backups present. vendor could deliver the right hardware and
software to bring the business back online—
DON’T OVERLOOK NETWORK and at the right cost.
REDUNDANCY
The common thread among these Today, as we expand the mandate to
components is the need for a robust network business resilience, it makes sense to
infrastructure. Your business resilience plan broaden the partner evaluation process. You
may have copied your data to a secure offsite want to work with people who know more
location, but once disaster strikes, all that than switches and keystrokes. That means
careful planning and work is irrelevant if you higher-level consultants with the experience
don’t have network access. Unfortunately, and expertise to solve critical problems
this is perhaps the element of the IT under stressful conditions. Make sure you
infrastructure over which you have the least work with experts in SQL databases, Oracle
control. applications, Windows and Linux operating
systems, network protocols, networked
For that reason, most enterprises are storage architectures, and virtual desktops.
opting to partner with providers that can When the pressure’s on, you want smart
supply redundant carrier-grade network options and insights—not empty stares.
connectivity. This can dramatically improve
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 7 7

IMPLEMENTING A
BUSINESS RESILIENCE
PLAN

Integrating resilience into your business isn’t BENCHMARK YOUR TECHNOLOGY

just about inventorying servers or calculating It’s prudent to undertake complete testing of
bandwidth requirements. Instead, you’re your infrastructure and processes. How long
delving into business requirements and does it really take to recover from a disaster?
understanding the priorities for protecting or For example, do the servers and storage
restoring services. Business resilience starts devices respond quickly? What hurdles do
with careful and thorough planning: you encounter—and what steps do you need
to take to eliminate them?
AUDIT YOUR APPLICATIONS
Examine your applications thoroughly. Are DOCUMENT YOUR PROCESSES
they enabled to take full advantage of When disaster strikes, your regular team may
business resilience requirements? If not, not be able to travel to your facilities and
what scope of work is required to re- perform their regular tasks. Document your
architect them to do so? Do your commercial processes thoroughly so novices can take
software vendors support your efforts to over crucial tasks until your business regains
capitalize on resilience? its footing. Training across geographies is
essential to ensuring resilience.
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 8 8

CONCLUSION: BE
PROACTIVE

Disaster recovery is, at its core, a reactive

discipline. It’s about setting up actions
that will take place after a disaster occurs.
Business resilience, by contrast, is about
being out in front, preventing the most
damaging aspects of any form of business
interruption. Business resilience is about
being ready so that when the hurricane is
bearing down on your organization, you’re
fully prepared to withstand the impact
on your business operations. By carefully
examining the key foundations—your
servers, desktops, network, and more—and
taking the necessary steps to audit your
applications, benchmark your technology,
and document your processes, you can be
proactive and resilient.
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 9 9

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