Trigence Blog

Business Continuity or more euphemistically called Disaster Recovery has always been an inexact science. Many companies have unfortunately found out how woefully prepared they were when disasters such as 9/11 or natural disasters struck their production facilities.

The real question is: How do you really recover from such catastrophic disasters which simultaneously strand your best technical personnel at the same time? During an emergency how can all those highly skilled and trained personnel actually contribute to and create business continuity?

Many enterprises have dedicated DR sites but how well are they really maintained? Small and medium businesses can fair much more poorly. The reality is that large enterprises can often take weeks before they truly recover. In fact most small to medium size businesses actually don’t get truly operational for months.

Why should a large enterprise be up and running in weeks and the small to medium businesses take months? What parts of a business are truly the most important? The first to be up and running after a disaster? Basic IT infrastructure? Critical applications? The answer is - it depends.

Most enterprises, firms and companies simply have a set of bare bones servers and OS/application backups to apply to those servers. Sure large enterprises have dedicated DR sites but the cost is enormous. Are those DR sites well-maintained, update and fool-proof?

Why doesn’t every one just virtualize all the infrastructure and applications? If DR sites have limited ability and expertise to recover IT-related business functions, virtualization seems the ideal way to guarantee the success of your business being able to survive a disaster.

Sure you can run more virtualized servers such as VMware on a limited set of servers. Servers can always be ghosted but imaging a server with a single application can add up to lots of dollars very quickly.

If you want to go even one better than virtualized servers why not virtualize an application and its dependencies.