Safety Nets

Whether you call it business continuity, disaster recovery--or just plain common sense--having in place a strategy for recovering data and applications in order to rapidly resume normal business operations has become a touchstone of good management. Indeed, redundancy, resiliency, and the ability to self-diagnose and heal ruptures in the networking fabric have become important selling points for a growing number of enterprise-system offerings.

The real problem, however, does not lie with the ability of individual components of a network to self-heal; the challenge lies with integrating the redundancy features of the dozens (in some cases hundreds) of systems that must work together in order to power enterprise operations.

The sheer complexity of heterogeneous networking environments creates holes in the business continuity safety net. Multi-generational systems have developed different technological approaches to resuming operational status creating single-points-of-failure that can significantly degrade the ability to recover.

For many large companies, and the mid-tier as well, the answer to this challenge has been to embark on aggressive consolidation and infrastructure-simplification programs. These strategies are not only designed to reduce the number of moving parts (or number of boxes) that must be in working order to maintain operations; they also are designed to aggregate and automate the way companies manage the consolidated environment.

Advances in virtualization technology, which allow multiple systems to be managed from a single console, have created major opportunities to simplify the business-recovery process.But technology only addresses part of the problem. Just as we are seeing a growing number of non-technical executives participate in IT acquisition and deployment decisions, the business-continuity and disaster-recovery planning process requires substantial participation from executives across the different entities of the enterprise.

Should You Risk It? What's Continuity Worth To You?
The first rule of disaster planning: what you see on the news is not what's going to happen to you. There's a disconnect between the popular perception of "disaster" and what really happens to grind business to a halt.

Storage Vendors Hone In On Backup, NAS, Security

Storage Networking World in Phoenix was rife with backup and recovery options, making Exchange server a bigger part of networked storage, and even some storage security thrown in for good measure.

Mid Market Getting Serious About Security -- For The Most Part
Most mid-market companies view their current spending on security as a sound business investment, but a large minority sees it as an expense that must be minimized.

DEEP BACKGROUNDMicrosoft Adds Disaster Recovery Rights - Networking Pipeline

Veritas Delivers New Disaster Recovery Products - Networking Pipeline

Master The Disaster - Networking Pipeline

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