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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Introduction

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 catching 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:

Global Economy—The growing use of Internet-enabled applications, and the proliferation of devices to access the Internet are driving requirements for round-the-clock, 24x7 access to corporate databases. This networked world has no tolerance for downtime, either planned or unplanned. For example, over the last decade, email has grown from a novel way to communicate to a business-critical application.

Business Process Interdependencies—Some critical applications are so intertwined in the business that if interrupted, they can cause a series of disruptions, eventually leading to a complete failure of business processes. For example, a database operator could unknowingly enter a command causing an entire customer relationship management (CRM) system to come to a halt. While the problem is diagnosed and resolved, customer information must be recorded manually. The company must then face the challenge and cost of accurately and securely inputting the data, while continuing normal operations. In addition, CRM systems are often dependent on other corporate databases such as order entry, marketing, inventory control, and shipping. Therefore, a failure of one database can cascade through the entire business infrastructure.