The global economy has led to a flattening of the business world and geographic boundaries have fallen to a great extent. No longer does a country`s physical boundaries pose an insurmountable barrier to entry as it did in the decades following WWII through the early 90s. The driving forces for this were the IT revolution and the signing of many bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements among nations. These have suppressed boundaries as barriers and the availability of information, and the ability to distribute data over the web has hastened these trends. Thus, businesses have to ensure they are constantly creating value for customers by driving costs from their operations. This takes several forms such as relocating manufacturing to low cost, high efficiency parts of the world, outsourcing non core operations (eg payroll, programming), etc. The ability to do this is tied to the health of businesses` WANs, creating the information highway that connects various business operations together and also cements the relationship between customer and business.
Lack of a Business Continuity Plan is fraught with the danger of having a business vulnerable to various interruptions. From a data perspective, businesses that plan for disasters improve their chances of recovering fast while those that do not have to scramble to handle it. In the process, those that are unprepared lose money and customers and oftentimes irreparable harm to their reputations.
A Business Continuity Plan, from a protecting data planning perspective, calls for some of the following:
- Data mirroring
- Off site data storage
- WAN Redundancy
The first two are required to handle emergencies such as 9/11, Katrina, Tsunami, and other rare but catastrophic events. Of the three mentioned above, WAN Redundancy is the most critical from a frequency of occurrence perspective. WANs do fail often enough they have to be taken into account when developing a Business Continuity Plan. It is estimated that WAN Redundancy will take care of 35% of all Business Continuity concerns. Thus a small effort in the area of WAN Redundancy has a big payback.
