Business Continuity
During a Disaster Recovery (DR) implementation effort the last thing
you want is unexpected hardware and software configuration issues.
These tend to consume time, resources, and cause Recovery Time
Objectives (RTO) to be missed. In order to ensure business continuity,
organizations must design, implement, maintain and enforce policies,
guidelines, standards and procedures that encompass all aspects of their
critical business functions. A successful DR effort is not only
dependent upon a well thought-out DR plan; it must have been derived
from an enterprise wide mentality of business continuity. Furthermore,
business continuity must be the beginning point in systems design, not
the end point. Unfortunately, very few systems are built from the
business continuity perspective backwards.
Business Continuity is the activity performed by an organization to
ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers,
suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those
functions. These activities include many daily chores such as project
management, system backups, change control, and help desk. Business
Continuity is not something implemented at the time of a disaster;
Business Continuity is those activities performed on a daily basis to
maintain business function service, consistency, recoverability, and
regulatory compliance.
The foundation of Business Continuity is the policies, guidelines,
standards, and procedures implemented by an organization. All system
design, implementation, support, and maintenance must be based on this
foundation in order to have any hope of achieving Business Continuity,
Disaster Recovery, or in some cases, system support. It is usually a bad
idea to attempt to maintain multiple standards in support of a specific
IT area. In many organizations today, separate standards are maintained
for standalone AIX systems, HACMP clusters, and disaster recovery
groups. This series of documents will show that is not necessary and
how to consolidate into a single standard for all AIX systems, including
HACMP and disaster recovery.
The documents presented here will define many IT areas that require
enterprise wide policies, guidelines, standards, and procedures be
defined, and will offer recommended solutions for those defined areas.
Definition: Enterprise Wide Unique (EWU) -
refers to a parameter that has one distinct value across any or all
platforms throughout the entire enterprise.
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