Now's the time to rethink business continuity

Taking advantage of technological advances in data protection is key to successCharles ClarkeTechnical director for Veeam Asia PacificPRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS listed Singapore as the leading global business hub in the Asia-Pacific in its recent study as the best cities for doing business.文件倉 Ranked ninth globally, the country harbours developed infrastructure, economic clout, technology readiness, open business policies and respected intellectual property rights.With a reputation to live up to, Singapore as a thriving hub for business activities, cannot afford to miss a beat or take a breath. Despite advancements in infrastructure robustness, many businesses still face database, hardware and software downtime. Downtime can vary from a few hours to shutting down the business for days.As a result, businesses suffer a grave loss in revenue and double the hard work in getting back on track. Downtime for businesses no doubt has dramatic ramifications, and therefore needs to be understood and, if possible, prevented.Veeam's independent Virtualisation Data Protection Report (survey of 500 CIOs) revealed that each hour of downtime costs an enterprise US$324,793. Which means that downtime is, on average, costing organisations at least US$1.6 million per incident in lost productivity and lost revenue. Technologies find that a lot of IT downtime is still plaguing end-users; worse yet, if businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan in place.As more businesses expand their reliance on IT, it's surprising to see so much tolerance for IT downtime, especially in an era of virtualisation that can minimise IT downtime, if not make it unnecessary altogether.The cost of downtime is often calculated as Cost of downtime = Outage hours (Lost productivity + Lost revenue). Though simplistic, this formula is effective as it does capture the essence of downtime.However, it may not be entirely representative as it does miss things like ancillary costs. For example, a lack of staff morale and, more importantly, the lack of confidence in the marketplace.The true effects of downtime might often be underestimated, such as in the case of M1, a telecommunications provider in Singapore. The company suffered three days of downtime in January 2013, and al存倉 it took was a similar amount of time for the news to explode on social media channels such as blogs and Facebook.The ease of information sharing soon led to widespread awareness, and ultimately culminated in a reduced confidence in the brand. The question is how would this event affect the decision-making processes of potential M1 customers or those who are renewing their contracts in the coming weeks, months and years - after all, the Internet never forgets.It is more critical now than ever as we move closer to the goals of IN2015 and shape Singapore into becoming the world's leading-edge information and communications economy.Other economies in the region are following suit, with Malaysia being a notable example through their significantly increased investment in data centres, as well as their characteristics of having land as a resource and being free from natural disasters.A key driving force behind data centre investment and regional adoption of "cloud methodology" is virtualisation.Confidence in existing disaster recovery techniques is falling in the Asia-Pacific countries that are highly reliant on virtualisation, such as Australia and New Zealand which have a server virtualisation rate of around 73 per cent. Essentially, the belief is that recovery becomes less effective as data grows and virtual environments sprawl.Contrary to the logic that virtualisation naturally lends itself to easier management and improved business continuity, virtualisation does deliver special benefits such as good management to ensure that business continuity can be assured as environments grow.With the rise of virtualisation and the strength of infrastructure investment in key parts of Asia, the potential to reduce downtime costs through well-managed, multi-tiered data recovery has never been bigger.Improvements in storage capacity and performance, computer-layer performance and the ability to extend disaster recovery to the cloud have allowed us to unlock business continuity techniques that were either physically impossible or prohibitively expensive just a few years ago.Now is the time for Asian organisations to rethink business continuity, and reverse the trend of increasing complexity and costs in their data protection strategy.儲存