Chapter 9
Introduction to Business Continuity
Key Concepts
In today's world, continuous access to information is a must for the smooth functioning of business operations. The cost of unavailability of information is greater than ever, and outages in key industries cost millions of dollars per hour. There are many threats to information availability, such as natural disasters, unplanned occurrences, and planned occurrences, that could result in the inaccessibility of information. Therefore it is critical for businesses to define an appropriate strategy that can help them overcome these crises. Business continuity is an important process to define and implement these strategies.
Business continuity (BC) is an integrated and enterprise-wide process that includes all activities (internal and external to IT) that a business must perform to mitigate the impact of planned and unplanned downtime. BC entails preparing for, responding to, and recovering from a system outage that adversely affects business operations. It involves proactive measures, such as business impact analysis, risk assessments, BC technology solutions deployment (backup and replication), and reactive measures, such as disaster recovery and restart, to be invoked in the event of a failure. The goal of a BC solution is to ensure the “information availability” required to conduct vital business operations. ...
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