IT is increasing its focus on disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) largely due to natural disasters that have occurred in the past year. However, the majority of IT failures and loss of applications is due to hardware errors and simple human error. How can IT plan for these unexpected outages? IT administrators need an insurance policy — a DR plan — for their company data, applications, and infrastructure that will automatically start when an error occurs. Similar to how a homeowner carries house insurance to protect against unplanned events, the DR plan serves as IT’s insurance plan for data and infrastructure.
This plan must go beyond just protecting the data or content stored within the infrastructure. Data is only good as long as the applications and servers it runs on are working. Thus, today’s DR plans must go beyond the traditional data backup mentality. Applications, servers, and systems — the entire data center infrastructure — must be protected at off-site locations where companies can restore IT operations at the flick of a switch. The challenge is how to implement DR successfully into today’s increasingly complex environments, since traditional data protection methods cannot scale easily to handle massive data growth.