How to successfully implement a disaster recovery plan (page 1 of 2)

Most major organisations are now running critical enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). These applications are integrated across the enterprise to such an extent that they touch everyone from employees and customers to suppliers and partners, and they form the backbone for all business, from e-commerce to business intelligence.

Such integration across the enterprise presents the greatest challenge to the success of continuity and recovery. The more integrated the enterprise application environment is, the harder it is to recover, no matter what the process. This is because so much more must be available simultaneously.

While applications that run on a single platform, such as a mainframe, can be recovered as a single unit with little concern for other systems that may be interconnected, most ERP applications utilise a three-tier architecture: database, application, and presentation layers. They share a common database and are distributed to users across the globe via LANs and WANs.

The world's largest corporations deploy ERP, SCM, and CRM applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Sybase, and Siebel. In some cases, these applications process millions of transactions per hour, per minute, or even per second. Furthermore, the databases grow exponentially to accommodate all the data, very rapidly reaching the terabyte threshold and beyond.

Not only do the ERP applications process and store transaction data, but they also link to other applications, such as business intelligence, knowledge management, and e-business applications. Since these applications are at the heart of the enterprise, most organisations cannot afford downtime, let alone lost data. Furthermore, the level of criticality of these applications increases as people outside the enterprise access them via the Internet.

An integrated suite of ERP applications must match the business processes of an organisation, and must also run in such a way that data can be entered once to flow through to all the modules and be accessible to all users who need the information. Implementation is therefore complex, as is recovery in the event of a disruption. It is essential that the recovery solution involve testing of the applications, including user testing.

The Need for Business Continuity
As organisations extend their ERP applications, it becomes more important to reduce recovery time and recovery point objectives. In this new environment, traditional 48 to 72 - hour recovery times are no longer acceptable. Several factors combine to increase the need for business process availability and continuity and also raise the level of exposure:

1. Customers, suppliers, and partners now have access to ERP applications via customer relationship and supply chain management systems, via a website that interface with the core ERP applications. Specifically, when customers use the Internet, they have no tolerance for downtime.

2. ERP applications are the foundation for all process and transaction information within and beyond the enterprise; therefore, organisations are increasingly dependent on ERP processes and information. This encompasses all applications from the core transaction systems to supply chain management, customer relationship management, e-procurement, business intelligence, planning, budgeting, and knowledge management.

3.