Business Continuity for the 21st Century
Business dependency on IT systems has never been greater, so when things go wrong the impact can be catastrophic. Whether its the CEO waiting for information as part of an acquisition negotiation, or the countless of processes that flow through the business website, any glitch in the IT structure can wreak havoc with productivity, revenue and the organizations image.
Yet in spite of the crucial role of business applications the approach to keeping them up and running remains in the dark ages for many businesses. In todays cut throat and budget-sensitive world nothing short of continuous availability is required for the most important applications.
What business owners need to demand,
is a cost-effective continuous availability for the 21st century. One that is architected to focus on those applications that are most essential; to be flexible enough to fit into existing and future IT infrastructures; to deliver integrated high availability and disaster protection in a unique solution; to allow accelerated performance over wide area networks; to provide unparalleled levels of automation and control, and to do all this with minimum configuration and within budget.
Crucially, these systems protect business critical applications against downtime. Consistently, they will integrate class leading replication technology with application monitoring and disaster recovery to deliver continuous availability meaning users are not disrupted when IT systems go down.
Business demands on IT change continuously. As new applications are brought in and current configurations modify, the high availability software must adapt. Automatic discovery prevents configuration creep that could leave current applications exposed and the latest systems coming to market offer a point and click user interface to protect new and present applications.
A lot of systems provide an intuitive interface enabling real time visibility and control of application availability with a combination of local and remote protection choices. Policies and rules establish exactly what should occur to protect critical services
and automated or manual failover possibilities are available to meet business and IT needs.
The nature of IT systems is that at some point they will go wrong. External factors such as power interruptions may take complete data rooms down. Application failures will cause business processes to break. Selective component failures may take individual machines down. SAN issues may disrupt physical or virtual clusters and
whole sites are increasingly threatened by power issues and environmental disasters.
Continuous Availability solutions safeguard against all of these scenarios, and more. By using a business centric approach it is the only solution that will keep users working even when multiple software applications go down. The systems are built to commit on the user experience and keep them working when IT outages are inevitable. They integrate local high availability and remote disaster protection into one seamless method to provide business continuity. This ensures important applications stay available through unplanned IT downtime as well as enabling planned maintenance without disruption.
