Sample Business Continuity Plan Disaster Recovery Documentation: Disasters happen, even more so today than ever before. Before the turn of the century, organizations focused on preventing and avoiding environmental disasters such as fires or floods. And, much like businesses and people acquire insurance policies against the chance of fire and other disasters on capital assets such as buildings and automobiles, IT departments typically implement some kind of insurance in the form of redundancy to help applications recover from disasters. However, in the 21st century, disasters have expanded to include terrorist attacks, strings of hurricanes, extensive power grid failures, network threats such as worms and hackers, and business events such as mergers and acquisitions — forcing IT managers to change their focus from avoiding a possible disaster to recovering from an inevitable one. And these days, every minute it takes to recover can cost the business or organization in terms of lost sales and customers. Sun Java™ Availability Suite can help by enabling application and data access continuity across unlimited distance. Learn about disaster recovery and business continuity.

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Disasters happen, even more so today than ever before. Before the turn of the century, organizations focused on preventing and avoiding environmental disasters such as fires or floods. And, much like businesses and people acquire insurance policies against the chance of fire and other disasters on capital assets such as buildings and automobiles, IT departments typically implement some kind of insurance in the form of redundancy to help applications recover from disasters. However, in the 21st century, disasters have expanded to include terrorist attacks, strings of hurricanes, extensive power grid failures, network threats such as worms and hackers, and business events such as mergers and acquisitions — forcing IT managers to change their focus from avoiding a possible disaster to recovering from an inevitable one. And these days, every minute it takes to recover can cost the business or organization in terms of lost sales and customers, the cost of wages for people unable to perform their duties while the system or site is down, and the amount of time required to catch up once the system is functional again. All of these factors can eventually result in lost revenue and, depending on the length of downtime, even a total loss of the business itself. Sun Java™ Availability Suite can help by enabling application and data access continuity across unlimited distance.

Why Business Continuity?

The unavoidable possibility of some disaster occurring, combined with the financial risk of extended downtime, are causing an evolution in thinking from simply recovering after disasters to continuing business despite disasters. In addition, there are a number of other trends currently influencing the development of business continuance strategies: