Striking the balance between cost and criticality

There's no getting away from the fact: IT has now become critical to business. In fact, in many instances, the business is virtually indistinguishable from the IT platform on which it operates. For CIOs, this means tremendous pressure to provide business continuity solutions that will keep the business running and its reputation intact when disaster strikes.

Of course, business continuity providers like ContinuitySA have developed the increasingly sophisticated recovery solutions to do just that. The technology to get an organisation's IT systems up and running in minutes in the event of a disaster now exists - but the problem is that most, if not all companies cannot afford this Rolls-Royce solution for all their data.

This reality check is all the more severe given the current circumstances in which we find ourselves. The global recession may or may not be ending, but companies remain under very tight cost constraints, and are likely to remain so. CIOs really are being forced to do more with less.

The second circumstance that complicates the CIO's life is the huge explosion in data generated by ubiquitous IT. Gartner estimates that businesses are growing their data capacity at between 40% and 60% annually, in part because of the growing torrent of unstructured data like e-mail and documents that need to be kept for regulatory purposes.

Whereas once CIOs talked about kilobytes and gigabytes of storage, now it's no longer unusual to hear them talk about terabytes and petabytes!

All of this data is extremely costly to store, protect and keep available throughout a disaster. The truth of the matter is that CIOs desperately need a way to prioritise the data they must protect, and devise targeted solutions accordingly. A one-size-fits-all approach is either unaffordable if it uses the best solution, or not good enough if it takes a cheaper, less effective route.

At ContinuitySA, we have developed a six-step methodology for extending the traditional business impact analysis to give the CIO true visibility into the business impact of each component of the IT infrastructure. This view enables him or her to come up with a tiered IT service continuity solution. We call this the Infrastructure Impact Analysis (IIA).

The IIA allows the CIO to analyse the applications, systems and, crucially, the interdependencies between the various backend infrastructure components that support them. Based on which applications they enable, the IT components can be prioritised in terms of their criticality to the business. In this way, the CIO gains total visibility not only of the front-end (which is the area covered by the traditional business impact assessment), but the processes and ultimately the systems and infrastructure that support each part of the front-end.

With this view, it becomes easy to tier the data - we use a three-tier structure - in terms of which the most appropriate type of data recovery solution can be constructed. In crude terms, therefore, the Tier 1 super critical data can get the expensive, top-of-the-range managed solution with instant recovery, while Tiers 2 and 3 receive more affordable treatment. The cost savings of this tiered approach can be significant - but they are driven by a clear understanding of each IT infrastructure component's criticality to the business and not cost.

Conversely, by optimising the business continuity budget, the IIA makes the funds necessary to provide the managed business continuity that the Tier 1 data needs by migrating the lower tiers to less expensive solutions. There's a further benefit: the use of hosted business continuity management for Tier 1 creates a virtual environment that can also be used for production during normal business operations. In effect, this moves expenses off the capital budget and onto the operational segment.

In this way, an Infrastructure Impact Analysis can help CIOs meet the need to ensure that the business always has the necessary IT systems available and recoverable - within the budget constraints of the real world.