Identifying and ranking risks to your business according to potential loss is the first step in designing and implementing and business continuity solution. The list of potential risks can run from data corruption to natural disasters, to application crashes, power outages, failed backups, hardware failures, and, even, the likelihood of an SEC investigation. While you can do this yourself, Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services offers a Risk Analysis Workshop which can help you through a structured process. This service includes

• Review - and jointly score your organization's continuity environment with a cross-functional scorecard
• Identify - areas for potential improvement and objectively map them to available solutions
• Develop - a logical road map that prioritizes sequential steps for improvement within budgetary constraints
• Present - findings in a top-down fashion with scores, charts, and a high-level project plan

With the results of the Risk Analysis Workshop, you can articulate these potential risks and costs to executives so that everyone understands the trade-offs before problems occur.

The old saying has it: “the proof is in the pudding”. While there is really no culinary dimension to IT-focused business continuity, the proverb exemplifies that unless and until you can prove you can recover your data and applications in a certain amount of time following a variety of events or disruptions…it will be hard to measure success. Testing the recovery plan on a regular basis is absolutely critical.

The starting point is a good understanding of your risks, for example through the Risk Analysis Workshop. And remember that a strong infrastructure can have no weak links: to protect your critical data assets, robust and highly available storage systems are required, combined with software such as Hitachi Data Systems replication or data protection offerings.

The old saying has it: “the proof is in the pudding”. While there is really no culinary dimension to IT-focused business continuity, the proverb exemplifies that unless and until you can prove you can recover your data and applications in a certain amount of time following a variety of events or disruptions…it will be hard to measure success. Testing the recovery plan on a regular basis is absolutely critical.

The starting point is a good understanding of your risks, for example through the Risk Analysis Workshop. And remember that a strong infrastructure can have no weak links: to protect your critical data assets, robust and highly available storage systems are required, combined with software such as Hitachi Data Systems replication or data protection offerings.

 Backing up used to be easy…and recovery was sometimes tested. The world has changed and the tremendous growth of data now backed up by traditional backup infrastructures is causing havoc. Backup windows are a thing of the past—and recovering data in a timely fashion is ever more critical. On top of it all is the specter of compliance: Can you prove you have a backup? Can you show me you can recover?

In order to help organizations improve on their backup infrastructure, it is key to first understand what the backup activity really is, how many backups complete, how many fail…and how many are false positives. Through the combination of advanced backup reporting software and backup assessment services, Hitachi Data Systems can help determine what the best approach is to maximize return on investment. Hitachi Data Systems also offers unique data protection software: The Hitachi Data Protection Suite.

There are many variables that go into answering the question of how far away replication sites need to be. Among these are regulatory requirements, the likelihood of major power outages or natural events (earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.), best practices in your industry, insurance premiums, and, not least of all, your budget. There are trade-offs to be made:

Is 300 miles between sites enough distance? Perhaps not, if out-of-region disaster recovery is a requirement. Is being up and running on the same day good enough? What is the trade-off between distance and data currency? Is there a requirement for complete integrity of data? How much data you can afford to lose.

Hitachi Data Systems offers different solutions depending on your requirements:

 Replicating data over distance is a critical component to ensuring effective and efficient protection of your data assets. While synchronous replication is a great way to guarantee data integrity over metropolitan distances, the challenge becomes all the more daunting over long distances where asynchronous techniques have to be used. How do you ensure that the data is replicated exactly in the same sequence? You really can’t afford to lose anything in flight! To learn more, read our Ensuring Data Integrity with Asynchronous Replication white paper.

Using an asynchronous replication technology that guarantees data integrity by leveraging write order sequencing and/or time stamping is absolutely critical. It’s only a starting point since it is also critical to offer advanced management tools that allow you to maintain point in time copies at distance site for disaster recovery testing for example.

Critical application outrages cost organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost business opportunity, productivity, and customer satisfaction. It is therefore key to have a strategy in place to “get back on your feet” quickly and efficiently, locally or sometimes at a remote site depending upon the nature of the outage. In order to have recoverable data, it is critical to have identified the data protection characteristics and requirements of your key applications and identified and measured the risks that could affect your business operations. The ultimate goal is to essentially build data protection into the infrastructure by combining various technologies that optimize RPO and RTO.