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
INTRODUCTION
It’s late August in the sweltering Florida
Panhandle. Hurricane season is fast
approaching, and few people are sweating it
out more than the IT crisis teams hunkered
down in their cool air-conditioned conference
rooms, their faces glued to The Weather
Channel. These pros must prepare for and
respond to wave after wave of potential
disasters to keep their mission-critical data
centers up and running.
It’s an unenviable task, to be sure, and one
that has changed quite a bit over the years.
Back when business continuity and disaster
recovery (BCDR) became a non-negotiable
requirement in the world of corporate IT, the
primary focus of an IT crisis team might have
been to make tape backups and perform
restores.
Today, the BCDR mandate is all about
business resilience: taking a strategic,
proactive, multidisciplinary perspective
to sustaining the availability of critical IT
services in the face of all sorts of technology
and nontechnology disruptions.
Business resilience encompasses
everything from basic business continuity
to security, high-level risk management,
3
crisis management, and more. The BCDR
transformation reflects the changing
demands for ongoing performance in a
mobile virtual world. It also recognizes that
contemporary data centers are a complex
assortment of heterogeneous servers and
global networks as well as email, desktop
applications, databases, and web servers.
BCDR is a multifaceted challenge, and that
IT crisis team in the Florida Panhandle, like
scores of other teams around the world,
requires a diverse set of skills, processes,
and technology to do its job successfully.
The stakes are higher now, too. According to
studies by Emerson Network Power and the
Ponemon Institute,1 in a two-year period:
• Some 91 percent of companies
experienced an unplanned data
center outage
• During an unplanned data center
outage, companies lost $7,900 per
minute, up 41 percent from 2010
• $901,500—that’s the average cost
of a total data center outage
1 The Lowdown on Data Center Downtime,” available at
http://www.emersonnetworkpower.com/en-US/Solutions/
ByApplication/DataCenterNetworking/Data-Center-Insights/
Pages/Causes_of_Downtime_Study.aspx
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 4
BUILDING RESILIENCE
INTO YOUR BUSINESS
Increasing business complexity—more
markets, more products, more services—
translates into a significantly greater reliance
on IT to keep organizations running at peak
efficiency. IT is the differentiator, enabling
entirely new classes of virtual products and
services backed by responsive customer
support and driving marketing programs
and initiatives that were unthinkable even
five years ago. And IT is the foundation for
business intelligence and analytics that make
organizations smarter and more agile.
But this IT-dependent structure also
means businesses are more vulnerable to
disruptions, from hurricanes to hackers. The
stakes are higher, but so are the advantages
for organizations that can design business
resilience into their operations.
So how can your organization raise its game
and transition from mere business continuity
to true business resilience?
START WITH HOSTING
Naturally, servers are the heart of any IT
operation, which means business resilience
plans must start with strategies that
4
protect, preserve, and sustain the data and
applications running on those servers. The
same holds true for networked storage.
Your business resilience strategy should
feature a hosting partner that can act as the
second location of your IT operations. The
hosting partner should be able to support
your complete range of platforms and
operating systems and provide all important
capabilities: redundancy and failover
architectures, backup networks, and more.
Be sure to evaluate the partner’s security
from all perspectives—from network
perimeter to physical security of the hosting
facilities. Consider how your needs or plans
may evolve in the short term and long term,
and ensure your partner is able to support
those plans.
MAKE PEOPLE AND DESKTOPS AS
CRITICAL AS SERVERS
Unquestionably, the high-performance
servers and databases that store and process
essential data for business-critical services
in the data center are the irreplaceable
lifeblood of almost every sizable company.
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 5
BUILDING RESILIENCE At the same time, it’s equally true that
traditional desktop productivity applications
INTO YOUR BUSINESS and data (spreadsheets, documents, email
(CONTINUED)
clients, and presentations) are indispensable
components of the daily workflow.
Traditional business continuity strategies
have emphasized the importance of restoring
servers and centralized databases—at the
expense of giving users access to their vital
desktop apps and data.
Restoring access to desktops, and
specifically to data and applications, is an
essential component of business resilience.
For instance, during hurricane season, when
employees are working from home after a
storm hits, they need to get to their apps and
data.
Desktop virtualization solutions separate
the applications and data from the actual
user device, so as the IT team restores
the data center, it simultaneously restores
the desktops of thousands of users who
can subsequently log in from their remote
locations via just about any device and
access their own apps and data.
Many enterprises have explored virtual
desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions:
centralizing access to virtual desktops from
virtual machines in corporate data center
servers. Although this can be less expensive
than fleets of physical computers, companies
frequently find themselves spending much
more than originally anticipated: the upfront
CapEx required to deploy a VDI can be
tremendous. To illustrate, simply moving hard
drives from the desktop to the data center
can potentially increase storage costs more
than one hundred times. When combined
with compute density challenges and
increased data center expenses for power,
5
cooling, and floor space, the cost of moving
desktops to the data center can quickly
become prohibitive.
Cloud-based solutions such as NaviSite’s
NaviCloud Desktop as a Service are emerging
as a popular alternative to VDI approaches.
By moving desktops to the cloud rather
than an internally deployed and managed
data center, businesses can realize all the
promised benefits of virtual desktops—
centralized management, improved data
security, and simplified deployment—
without VDI’s costs, challenges, limitations,
or hassles.
SIMPLIFY STORAGE AND BACKUPS
Without question, in the new world of Big
Data, the need for storage is only increasing
as companies strive to capture, access,
and share data of all types. Around the
world, companies are amassing petabytes
of data every day—data that can play an
increasingly important role in company
operations and business strategies. What’s
more, a growing pile of continually changing
regulations governs retention of and access
to that data to ensure privacy, legal access
(e.g., discovery), and more.
In a resilient business, it’s essential that
employees and customers have the ability
to continually access data and resume its
usage as soon as possible in the wake of an
unplanned disruption. This need necessitates
an exponential increase in storage
infrastructure and creates corresponding
challenges for business resilience.
Despite its low-cost profile, tape has
largely been retired as a primary means
for backing up data, as it is slow, prone
to failure, and difficult to restore. By
contrast, disk-based backup and recovery
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 6
BUILDING RESILIENCE architectures provide exceptional levels of
flexibility, agility, and cost effectiveness.
INTO YOUR BUSINESS Rapid-interval snapshots—ten- to fifteen-
(CONTINUED)
minute transmissions of “deltas” (changes
to data)—minimize backup traffic on the
network, dramatically reducing the potential
data loss in the event of an unplanned
disruption and providing near immediate
restores. Local-disk snapshots can speed up
that process even more.
With disk-based backups, companies
can restore data and services faster
and greatly reduce the risk of data loss.
Scalable backup solutions are mandatory
for environments where data volumes are
constantly increasing. Finding a solution that
scales to meet the needs of the business
without requiring major upgrades or capital
investments is key. The safety and security
of disk-based backups are also superior
when compared to the many limitations tape
backups present.
DON’T OVERLOOK NETWORK
REDUNDANCY
The common thread among these
components is the need for a robust network
infrastructure. Your business resilience plan
may have copied your data to a secure offsite
location, but once disaster strikes, all that
careful planning and work is irrelevant if you
don’t have network access. Unfortunately,
this is perhaps the element of the IT
infrastructure over which you have the least
control.
For that reason, most enterprises are
opting to partner with providers that can
supply redundant carrier-grade network
connectivity. This can dramatically improve
6
your uptime performance, even in the face
of wide-scale disruptions. A private network
that provides Ethernet-based connectivity is
the most viable option for more bandwidth,
lower infrastructure costs, scalability,
and simplicity. Ethernet also provides a
cost-effective way to manage connections
for data archiving, preserve transaction
integrity, and strengthen business continuity.
A carrier-grade network also offers regional
ring networks: reliable, scalable, and
completely redundant fiber networks that
use innovative transport technologies.
PARTNER WITH EXPERTS
In the past, when evaluating and selecting
partners for basic business continuity and
disaster recovery, it wasn’t an unreasonable
strategy to carefully scrutinize every
technical feature and specification.
Questions largely revolved around which
vendor could deliver the right hardware and
software to bring the business back online—
and at the right cost.
Today, as we expand the mandate to
business resilience, it makes sense to
broaden the partner evaluation process. You
want to work with people who know more
than switches and keystrokes. That means
higher-level consultants with the experience
and expertise to solve critical problems
under stressful conditions. Make sure you
work with experts in SQL databases, Oracle
applications, Windows and Linux operating
systems, network protocols, networked
storage architectures, and virtual desktops.
When the pressure’s on, you want smart
options and insights—not empty stares.
 Whitepaper: The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience 7
IMPLEMENTING A
BUSINESS RESILIENCE
PLAN
Integrating resilience into your business isn’t
just about inventorying servers or calculating
bandwidth requirements. Instead, you’re
delving into business requirements and
understanding the priorities for protecting or
restoring services. Business resilience starts
with careful and thorough planning:
AUDIT YOUR APPLICATIONS
Examine your applications thoroughly. Are
they enabled to take full advantage of
business resilience requirements? If not,
what scope of work is required to re-
architect them to do so? Do your commercial
software vendors support your efforts to
capitalize on resilience?
7
BENCHMARK YOUR TECHNOLOGY
It’s prudent to undertake complete testing of
your infrastructure and processes. How long
does it really take to recover from a disaster?
For example, do the servers and storage
devices respond quickly? What hurdles do
you encounter—and what steps do you need
to take to eliminate them?
DOCUMENT YOUR PROCESSES
When disaster strikes, your regular team may
not be able to travel to your facilities and
perform their regular tasks. Document your
processes thoroughly so novices can take
over crucial tasks until your business regains
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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