Business Continuity Planning: A Must To Ensure Non Disruptive Business

Business today need to be prepared and have viable business continuity plans in place, well in advance, regardless of the disaster or emergency that may arise.

Having a plan that ensures “business-as-usual scenario” in the wake of a natural or manmade disaster is a critical task for enterprises of all sizes and is pertinent to ensure customer and partner confidence. Data over the past 20 years consistently show that an extremely high percentage of companies go out of business within one year of sustaining a multi-day outage.

In today’s rapidly changing IT environments, business continuity planning constitutes a complex process and presents formidable challenges for IT managers. A proactive approach and having the right ITNW solutions in place ensures that work doesn’t comes to a standstill and employees can still communicate and carry on business processes with internal or external customers in the event of a disaster or disruption.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) helps organizations to better prepare for disruptions in business operations including natural disasters, pandemics or outbreaks and comprises of a methodology used to create a plan for how an organization will resume partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a predetermined time post a disaster or disruption.

The interchangeable use of the terms “Business Continuity” and “Disaster Recovery” is because of the reason that some of the objectives underlined in a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan are same. However considering the spectrum of objectives covered, it can be said that the business continuity plan has a large scope.

Risk Assessment is one of the key components of disaster recovery planning. In order to create an effective plan for recovering post a catastrophe, an organization must foremost consider what potential disasters that they could feasibly encounter, and how each of these might impact their business continuity.

In a laconic sense, a business continuity plan will have two facets i.e. 

• Identification of the mission critical business functions
• Drafting of the plan, policies and the procedure to ensure the continuity of these critical functions in the event of a disaster

After the preparation of a comprehensive Business continuity plan the following activities needs to be preformed:

• Training of the employees to make them well verse with the Business continuity plan
• Performing mock drills to check the effectiveness of the drafted Business continuity plan

IT system being a business facilitator is an integral part of any business continuity plan hence to ensure non disruptive business it becomes a prerequisite to ensure high availability of the IT systems. The aim is to protect against unplanned downtime (breakdowns) and also against planned downtime (updates, upgrades, etc…), of which the consequences can sometimes be underestimated.

A wide range of technologies and approaches are available to help organizations in creating a comprehensive implementation plan in line with their BCP. With the wide spectrum of technologies available, a wise decision is required to be taken by an organization to select and deploy the best suited cost effective solution to meet their requirements.

As technologies are constantly developing, the implementation of a DR plan or a HA system solution can be very complex and costly in terms of administration of processes and resources as opposed to direct costs of implemented products (hardware, software). Therefore, technology innovation should be a simplification, consolidation and optimization service in order to reduce administration costs.

NEC offers an comprehensive integrated single-point business continuity solution  to its customer to better tackle business challenges. Based on technological leadership and innovation, NEC offers its clients a complete business continuity infrastructure (Servers, storage, Cluster, DRP, continuous availability, Management Software’s and Services) from a single-source, which can reach a 99.999% level of availability.

• Organizations looking for cost effective, comprehensive protection for business critical data and applications against hardware, software and site failures, should consider integrated HA & DR solutions such as NEC EXPRESSCLUSTER X. The solution offers disk mirroring based data protection and recovery to minimize data loss risks while offering high-availability clustering based application protection and recovery for fast and flexible application recovery.
• A single moment of downtime is not an option in today’s business environment. System administrators, therefore, focus their efforts on minimizing risk of downtime and keeping their systems up and running. Equipped with fully redundant components designed to run in lockstep, the industry standard Intel architecture-based NEC Express5800/ft series fault tolerant servers address planned and unplanned downtime and deliver exceptional availability.

The NEC FT Server System cluster with EXPRESSCLUSTER X, is ideal for mission-critical systems that require higher availability and reliability offering:

• Up-to 99.999% availability
• Affordable Fault Tolerance using industry standard Intel Xeon based technology
• No loss of transactions, no loss of data
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
• Provides both Hardware level as well as Software level redundancy
• Supports any Standard/Custom built application
• Have both Local High Availability as well Disaster Recovery capabilities
• Support for Virtualization technologies
• Operational Simplicity and Easy maintenance

NEC HYDRAstor is a highly resilient distributed grid storage solution exclusively designed to address global Backup, Archive & DR requirements of business with lesser cost, complexity & risk as compared to tape solution. NEC HYDRAstor offers key benefits, as

• Unrestricted scalability,
• Self-evolving system,
• Enterprise de-duplication,
• WAN friendly DR solution,
• Non-disruptive linear scalability from Entry-level to Datacenter-class,
• Adjustable node/disk protection level beyond RAID,
• Application aware de-duplication.
• Data Protection in case of a site failure
• Data Protection in case of disk / node failure 

In conclusion, businesses today cannot afford to have systems that are not up and available, especially during peak working hours. NEC is well positioned to address the full spectrum of requirements under a business continuity plan from high availability to data protection to disaster recovery through EXPRESSCLUSTER X and FT Server, similarly HYDRAstor fulfills backup, Archive and DR requirements. The planning, design and implementation of an NEC Business Continuity solution will ensure that critical systems and data are available when needed.

All in all a combination of these offerings from NEC ensures an efficient and effective implementation of the drafted Business continuity plan.