It wasn’t too long ago that disaster recovery and business continuity technologies were mostly about backup. Business processes did not depend on technology to the degree they do today. If access to applications was lost, most departments or business units could revert to manual processes while data was being restored from tape or hardware and applications were rebuilt and redeployed. Except for the largest global enterprises, most organisations did not have the need or the budget for costly business continuity technologies, such as long distance replication and application failover. Those that did mainly used basic two-node application failover for a handful of mission critical applications. Many did not even have a backup strategy in place.

The story is very different today. A disaster recovery and business continuity strategy is imperative. We only have to look at disasters like Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and closest to home – Hurricane Ivan’s devastation of Grenada to know that if you haven’t done so yet, you need to develop a technology plan and put a system in place - sooner as opposed to later! Notwithstanding, the increasing potential and mounting risk of even more lethal and numerous virus and worm attacks threatening an organisation daily.

Infotech’s guided business continuity strategy

• A comprehensive storage management platform and disk-based backup

• Local and remote application failover

• Keeping the Business Continuity plan current with business changes

• Understanding dependencies among systems

• Provisioning hot-site systems with complete images of production systems

• Run production applications at hot-sites in non-emergency times

• Continuous testing of the Business Continuity plan and key technology elements

CA’s (formerly Computer Associates) backup and recovery solutions provide data protection for IT environments of all sizes. These sophisticated tools protect databases, applications and other resources against a wide range of exposures, including application mistakes, operator error, disk failures and hardware malfunction.