This article was contributed to OUT-LAW by Ian Bond,
Consulting Systems Architect, Cisco Systems UK &
Ireland
Today’s rigorous market conditions demand something more than
recompense in the event of disasters – there is a real need to keep
a business up and running in order for it to remain competitive.
The risk to customer confidence, brand value, market position and
the financial implications of being kept from doing business for
any period of time are too great to be ignored. Further to this,
the nature of the threats involved is expanding in scope, and
having an impact over larger physical areas. And of course, there’s
always the pressure from regulators to reduce corporate risk
exposure – another area in which our Babylonian predecessors had an
easy ride.
Where pirates or storms were the ancient Babylonian’s principle
concerns, today CXOs must be concerned with natural and man-made
disasters on a scale that would have boggled the minds of the
ancient businessmen. Although natural disasters are as much of a
problem as ever, the increased reliance on digital information and
the networks that form the life-blood of most modern businesses
means that there is a new breed of threats that need to be
considered; those that might impact your customer and operational
data. As the nature of the risks change, so must the contingency
measures.
What’s the worst that could happen?
“What’s the worst that could happen?” is the first question any
business should ask when coming to devise a business continuity
plan. Although the nature of the risks vary, the issue of
consequence is the cost of an outage – if you had a complete stop
on all business operations, from sales, to accounting, to supply
chain, and so on, how much would that cost your business.
Once the operational losses are totted up, from lost sales
opportunities, cost of getting back online and so on – and this can
amount to millions of pounds for a large enterprise – there is the
impact on share price. Financial services and internet companies
have both seen a dramatic impact on their overall valuation
following well-publicised outages, and the emergence of millions of
weblogs over the last couple of years will ensure that any outage
that touches customers will be publicised.
The threats
Disasters on the scale of London’s 7th July bombings are
extremely rare, and will hopefully continue to be so, but do need
to be planned for nevertheless. The range of man-made threats has
potentially far wider impact than before – the (slim) possibility
of a dirty bomb in any urban centre often foils many contingency
plans, as it could take out an entire urban area – many businesses
place their second ‘backup’ data centre within a few miles of the
primary site. Similarly with digital threats – malware,
denial of service attacks and user error can result in servers,
branch offices and even data centres going completely out of
commission for indeterminate periods of time.
Some of the same measures to protect against the potential
man-made physical threats can be implemented to secure against more
mundane threats – for example, a power outage within a certain
range of your first data centre might also hit your second, if it
stands close by. If you co-locate some distance away, possibly in a
completely different city, you would have a measure of security
against this.
Similarly with natural disasters; whilst hurricanes are few and
far between on the British Isles, floods are less rare; snow has
been known to knock out power supplies and isolate urban areas, and
the threat of a natural epidemic putting an area into quarantine,
whilst potentially far fetched, should be considered.
Technology supporting planning
The historical need for the nearby co-location of data centres
was due to the prohibitive cost of creating high-speed links
between primary and secondary sites over large distances. This
issue has been resolved with the increasing availability of
multiprotocol Storage Area Networks (SANs), supporting
fibre-channel over IP (FCIP), a technology that enables very
long-distance co-location of data over thousands of kilometres.
Cisco itself, for example, has two data centres, one located on the
West Coast of the United States, and the other on the East Coast –
cities more than 2,500 miles apart. Through use of FCIP to extend
the storage infrastructure, a disaster recovery process is in place
which, in the event of one data centre going down, the other will
keep staff, partners and customers at US and other global sites up
and running.
Further to this, new wide area acceleration technology is
allowing branch offices to consolidate their data into central
silos, enabling more straightforward business continuity planning.
Where implementing manual backup measures at local branch offices
can prove complex to administer and slow to restore, maintaining a
central data store means that all a branch office needs to restore
its business operation is a new site – and this is something that
can be made available from many data centres. CSC UK, the UK arm of
a global consulting firm, has used wide-area file services
technology to consolidate their site data, ensuring that data
management, backup and restoration will be more
straightforward.
For businesses such as those in the financial sector, with the
need to provide a continuous data protection environment, advanced
technologies integrated into the storage network enable continuous,
transactional backup of data to a secondary site.
As far as protecting the integrity of the networks on which this
data circulates, careful security planning is needed; as a central
infrastructure supporting the applications critical to business
functions, it is key that corporate networks have enough
intelligence to defend themselves against fast-evolving digital
threats.
Conclusion
Business continuity planning is not about frightening the board
into assigning money to defend against unlikely probabilities. It
is about taking a realistic assessment of the cost of downtime to
your business, and putting proportionate measures in place to
secure against those risks; whether they come from man made or
natural disasters, physical or digital threats, or a result of
complying with regulatory requirements.
New technologies, including FC-IP, continuous data replication,
intelligent self-defending networks and wide-area file services
make long-distance co-location and consolidation of data into
secure centres more straightforward and cost-effective than was
previously possible; supporting a new breed of business continuity
solutions to protect against the new breed of threats that
businesses are now facing.
Cisco Systems is exhibiting at
Storage Expo 2006, the UK's largest event
dedicated to data storage, in the National Hall,
Olympia, Londonfrom 18 – 19 October
2006
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