Quoting Continuity Central
If you work in business continuity management but don’t have an IT background, you may wonder what storage virtualization has got to do with your role and objectives. In this article I hope to show that there should be no hard demarcation between BCM objectives and those of business supportive IT, especially when it comes to information management. Virtualization has its part to play in BCM strategies whether it is virtual people resources, virtual facilities or virtual IT assets and provisioning (the process of providing users with access to data and technology resources).
The challenges
Day-to-day information continuity is essential. Loss of availability, for any reason, could lead to loss of service delivery, and this in turn can create severe disadvantages for a business on all fronts, damaging brand image, share price, customer retention, time-to-market and even workforce morale. It is therefore imperative that any IT infrastructure addresses these daily issues.
IT hardware and software issues have meant that over the last few years, an ever-increasing number of UK organisations have had to invoke their disaster recovery plan, an exercise that in itself is very high risk to the business. There is also an indication of a major increase in power-related incidents, so the more organisations can do to improve management of power and cooling within IT and lessen the load on their supply systems, the better their business continuity positioning will be.
There is certainly a growing industry focus on decreasing IT downtime, with recent predictions finding that companies are aiming for business continuity management strategies that take into consideration:
* Better business and IT alignment through new technology deployment
* Information availability through risk mitigation
* Virtualised technologies
* People-availability planning.
Interestingly, this research also predicts that business recovery will evolve into risk mitigation and that business intelligence tools, besides other things, will facilitate fast action in response to changing conditions.
From this we can infer that businesses will focus more on continuous operational capability, with recovery from major incidents playing a secondary part. This will have a major influence on how business continuity budgets are targeted, for example shifting the focus to the IT component parts (people, process, infrastructure) that contribute mainly to disaster recovery plan invocations.
We should also start to see calls for agility in all operational areas, and it will be high levels of flexibility that deliver the highest agility and capability to address a changing business requirement.
A further challenge is that IT has often been seen as something of a mystic art or necessary evil by the business executive with no clear understanding of where it can truly add value. The adoption of such enterprise IT strategies as services oriented architectures (SOA), a solution that supports and brings together loosely coupled services to enable business flexibility, will help in addressing these business perceptions.
A recent survey shows that there is currently a marked difference between business and IT understandings of business continuity issues:
* 66 per cent of IT execs deem uninterrupted information availability a major priority, compared to 54 per cent of business execs
* 43 per cent of IT execs blame budget constraints for inadequate disaster recovery systems while only 26 per cent of business execs would agree with this
* Business execs believe that the continuous operation of customer facing systems (CRM, SCM, ERP) is far more important than IT execs do
* Both groups did agree that e-mail, back-office applications, customer service and telecommunications should feature in a list of five key corporate priorities that would impact the organisations bottom line if stopped.
Perhaps this explains why a business continuity management program based on a hypothetical disaster scenario can sometimes be hard to sell to a board of business executives who are more inclined to ask what tangible deliverables their BCM budget is buying on a day-to-day basis, rather than worrying what it will achieve if a disaster does strike.
The results do show, however, that business and IT representatives are in agreement that business requirements for continuous information availability are key, and that the highest information values can be attributed to customer-facing processes and supporting IT applications. Understanding this, we can see the importance of information availability to the success of the organisation and its ability to compete – it is fundamental to the way we should approach any business continuity strategy deliberations and plan formulation.
As the competitive and global business climate of this century heats up, information management is becoming the weak link of business continuity strategies. It is an area that will need far greater attention from BCM teams beyond the usual requirements for a ‘ tick in the box’ against the IT disaster recovery plan. In fact, the most successful organisations of this century will be the ones who recognise the true value of information and become adept in its utilisation and management, recognising it both as a principal business asset and a potential principal risk.
Decision-making for data storage strategies and purchase will no longer be left to the IT departments and purely based on cost considerations, but will include a wider team. This team will include BCM professionals who will assess the value that data storage technology brings across the business units and in particular, how regulatory compliance associated with information management can be achieved and maintained.
Continuous data availability is achievable today but what are the enabling technologies and how can the purchase be justifiable on the grounds of business continuity management?
Storage virtualization
Storage virtualization expert Tom Clark, states: “Storage virtualization provides an abstraction layer over physical storage systems and enables multiple storage assets to be treated as a single logical entity”. He comments that this provides a solid platform on which to build more advanced functionality. It is resource flexibility that delivers this advancement in functionality.
Storage virtualization can deliver many business continuity benefits, including:
* Enhanced management effectiveness of the current exponential data growth. This will introduce simplification and mitigation of operational risks, help achieve compliance objectives and make better use of people resources;
* Enable continuous operations, non-disruptive storage growth and maintenance, which further assures information availability day-to-day;
* Better asset utilisation leading to a lower-cost storage estate and a reduction in the power and cooling demands on the data centre, further mitigating risk;
* The environment for common data protection mechanisms that will operate across all the storage estate, irrespective of vendor or product, will negate the requirement for dedicated storage system administration teams and lead to better ‘people availability’;
* Resource flexibility that will meet the requirements of an agile business.
One of the primary benefits of virtualization is the consolidation of storage assets to create effective storage management and better utilisation rates. The consolidated infrastructure can be built upon a tiered architecture model and overlaid with common management tools. The difficulty however, is in ensuring that the solution is flexible enough to meet changing business requirements without introducing complexity and calling for subsequent increases in management overheads.
If we look at resource management as the basis for a BCM strategy, and in particular how we can better manage the data storage resources, it becomes apparent that resource flexibility delivers the highest levels of business continuity options based on cost, quality of service and risk mitigation. Virtualization offers the highest levels of flexibility of physical resources, and by consolidating data storage assets into a single virtual managed pool, complexity and operational risk will be reduced. Lower infrastructure costs and power usage requirements can also be realised and any corporate green policy that is tied to a BCM strategy will show greater benefit from both reducing power usage and mitigating some of the risks associated with data centre power limitations.
Virtualization will be a major focal point for both BCM and IT professionals in the coming months and already we see references appearing in industry standards and best practice papers. The PAS 77 ‘IT Service Continuity Management’ code of practice from the British Standards Institution (BSI) gives some indication of the importance of storage virtualization and the value it can bring. Understanding that this best practice should, ideally, align with the best practices set out by the BSI in BS 25999, it is important for BCM professionals from both sides of the business-IT divide to understand the benefits of virtualization in the data storage space.
So there we have it, a future in which virtualization technologies could help enhance business continuity by assisting with business and IT alignment; reduce operational interruptions; improve resource availabilities; provide higher levels of information availability and enable agile response to business change to assist organisations in remaining competitive.
Read the original, here.