Today's data centre infrastructures are complex fabrics of interconnected applications, platforms, and storage arrays. Given the dynamic and interdependent nature of these systems, many large enterprises have limited visibility into just how resilient their data centres will be in the event of a disaster or an outage.
Many enterprises have gaps in their continuity strategies and infrastructure that will only become apparent in a real-world crisis.
Malcolm Clark, director, Recovery Assurance
Periodic disaster recovery and business continuity testing is not enough to detect potential points of failure, since production configuration changes occur nearly every day in these environments. What's more, the amount of data that needs to be replicated at recovery sites is growing at a rapid rate.
Large companies are spending millions of rands on high-availability solutions and disaster recovery, yet cannot be sure they will be able to keep running or recover their information quickly if disaster strikes, says Malcolm Clark, director at Recovery Assurance. Many companies have gaps in their strategies and infrastructure that will only become apparent in a real-world crisis.
Routine manual testing simply cannot keep up to date with the rate of change in modern data centres or with the range of dependencies that need to be tested. Most disaster recovery and continuity tests and drills run through systems in isolation from each other, rather than taking into account how they intersect.
Potential weaknesses
For that reason, more large companies are starting to turn to service availability risk management solutions that allow them to automate the process of or identifying gaps in their continuity and recovery solutions. Such solutions monitor an enterprise's recovery position by the day so that the organisation can address potential gaps before they turn into serious issues, says Clark.
These solutions highlight where an organisation might miss its recovery time and recovery point objectives in the case of an outage or failure. Such solutions allow organisations to focus their testing on the readiness of their people and processes rather than expending their energy on testing the IT systems, says Clark.
They also equip IT departments with the information they need to understand where potential weaknesses in the architecture may pose a threat to the business, so they can motivate for budget should it be necessary, he adds.
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