Life in Venice doesn't stop every time it floods. People roll up their trousers, pull on their wellies and still walk to the grocer's, go to work, grab a vino with friends. And when it's all over they mop the floor, dry the furniture, and go back to their pre-flood life. How do they do it? They choose not to have carpet or wooden flooring, keep updated on water level and have a spare pair of boots right next to the door. This is called prevention.
When it comes to faults in IT systems, both common and rare just like flooding can be, prevention is not better than cure - it is the cure, the only one to allow business continuity and resilience.
Complicated machinery and analysis are a thing of the past: nowadays planning is extraordinarily easy thanks to the expertise given by Best Practice processes, and new technologies such as virtualisation that can bring user downtime close to zero.
First of all, it must be noted that virtualising servers, desktop, data centre is not something that can be done overnight. Planning is needed to avoid choosing the wrong solution, perhaps based on what the latest product on the market is and on media talk rather than what works best for the specific needs of one's business, and to shun possible inefficiencies, interruption of business services, or even data loss during the process. Best Practice, then, comes across as the essential framework in which all operations should be carried out in order for them to be successful.
Any change made to the system, in fact, needs a mature level of Best Practice processes such as world-renowned ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) in place, to guide organisations in planning the best route in dealing with all operations and incidents, and are a key tool for avoiding inefficiencies in money and time, and improving the performance of the IT department and of the business as a whole.
Once this is sorted, you can think about going virtual. From a technical point of view, virtualisation is gaining importance in business resilience and continuity planning thanks to the progress made by new technologies. Products such as VMware's Vsphere, for example, allow what is called "live migration": capacity and speed of the virtual machines are seen as an aggregate rather than individually, and as a consequence not only the load is more evenly distributed, for faster, smoother operations, but whenever a machine crashes resources are immediately accessible from another connected device, without the user even noticing and without interrupting the procedure.
Moreover, data is stored on a virtual central storage so that it is accessible from different source and does not get lost during system malfunctions, making business resilience faster and easier.
Guided by the expertise of Best Practice and with the help of virtualisation products that suit individual needs and goals, business resilience and continuity planning will not only come easier, but also make results more effective, allowing organisations to deliver their services and carry out their operations without fear of interruptions, inefficiencies or data loss.
Pete Canavan, Head of Service Transition
This article is in April's issue of Contingency Today, and is also online at: http://www.contingencytoday.com/online_article/Best-Practice-and-Virtualisation/2242
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