Invest now or pay later: The imperative of business continuity (page 1 of 2)

For a financial institution, the average hourly loss is closer to $1.5 million. And for utility companies such as telecommunications and energy, the potential loss can reach as high as $2.8 million per hour. That's over $67 million in a day. Or $24.5 trillion in a year.

These statistics only prove what you already know: Downtime is disastrous. According to Greg Valdez, Chief Information Officer for VERITAS Software, "High availability plans and data protection strategies are no longer optional in the corporate world; they are absolute necessities. Uptime is too important to the business. And there are too many potential causes of downtime to expect that your systems are infallible."

Despite this clear message that downtime is disastrous, Gartner research shows that fewer than 30 percent of Fortune 2000 companies have invested in a full business continuance plan. The reason for this oversight may simply be that the technical challenges seem too daunting. Or perhaps the cost of implementation is perceived as too great. These are viable concerns, but they can be addressed with Business Continuity solutions from VERITAS.

Build a Resilient Data Center
The first step in your business continuity plan is to build a data center that can continue operations in the face of hardware failure, power outage, or other common IT challenges. To accomplish this, you need to ensure that your hardware, data, and applications are redundant, highly available, scalable, and secure.

Clustering is a popular tactic to build resiliency into your data center. VERITAS Cluster Server (winner of the Network Magazine 2002 Product of the Year award) is ideal for eliminating both planned and unplanned downtime. As servers and clusters go online and offline, VERITAS Cluster Server automatically reallocates the load for optimal performance based on the priorities you set.

It also reroutes traffic, applications, and data in case any component of the data center goes out of service. The result is higher levels of availability while keeping costs down by leveraging all of your available server resources.

"Companies need resilient and flexible computing architectures that can adapt to changing business requirements while ensuring that information is always available," says Mark Bregman, Executive Vice President of Product Operations at VERITAS. "With VERITAS Cluster Server, companies can take a proactive approach to managing their critical information environments and business operations."

Build It Again, Somewhere Else
The next step is to build another resilient data center at a separate location. True resiliency is achieved by ensuring that business-critical information resides in more than one place, and that the two locations are not susceptible to the same disaster. For example, VERITAS has a primary data center in California and another one in Minnesota.

Enable Communication Across Data Centers
Whether it's from California to Minnesota, Paris to London, or Sydney to San Francisco, you need to be able to share data between data centers. With VERITAS Volume Replicator, you can replicate critical data volumes over any IP network and across any distance. Depending on your needs, you can opt for either synchronous or asynchronous replication. And you can use the industry-leading storage virtualization solution, VERITAS Volume Manager, to manage your entire storage infrastructure.

Getting the data to the right location is absolutely essential.