Sharath Shetty

The starting point for building a resilient IT environment is a thorough understanding of your business requirements, the risks and threats you face, and the impact of downtime on each critical business process. The costs of downtime are probably far greater than you think. You also risk losing employee productivity, corporate reputation and credibility with customers, shareholders and the revenues.

HP suggests a comprehensive process to help you understand where you are now and what you need to do to build a resilient infrastructure. It starts from the perspective of your business users and includes four steps:

Step 1. Define business requirements. Evaluate the requirements of all your business processes and applications across the enterprise in regard to regulatory compliance, availability, security and business continuity. Measure the impact of downtime for each business application and process.

Step 2. Assess and prioritize risk. Conduct comprehensive, in-depth availability, security and continuity assessments to identify areas of risk and strategies for protecting your IT environment and improving IT service. Compare your practices to industry best practices recommended by ITIL and others. Identify gaps and prioritize your risks according to business impact.

Step 3. Design and implement solutions. Translate your requirements into executable solutions of technology and services encompassing storage, databases, applications, systems and networks. Build a continual service improvement plan.

Step 4. Monitor, manage and evolve. Establish IT service management policies and training to align people and processes with best practices. As your business evolves, reassess, monitor and test your continuity and availability plan.

How to achieve this Read.....

HP say " that while many companies have adequate business continuity, availability and disaster recovery systems in place, only 26 percent regularly review and test their plans."
Read It..