Introduction

According to process improvement guru Geary Rummler, any "organization is only as good as its processes." This is particularly true in the rapidly-changing and mission critical area of run-time IT operations, where even short-term failures can mean big-ticket business losses.

As the data center becomes highly virtualized, and more and more business applications require near-continuous availability, the demand for faster, easier, and less expensive recovery solutions has never been greater.

Traditional disaster recovery solutions target a limited set of static devices or applications, are often prohibitively expensive, and rarely address the human processes and workflows that are critical in a failure situation. A new approach to disaster recovery is needed.

Your organization should be able to answer the following questions:

• Can you respond with confidence to a component, application or complete site failure?
• More importantly, can you respond quickly enough?
• Have you tested your recovery procedures recently?
• Have you defined clear recovery metrics for each business application and technology component?
• Are you leveraging virtualization effectively?
• And, most importantly, does your IT organizational structure support your disaster recovery strategy?
• Do you have agreed SLAs in place for recovery of applications?
• Have you prioritized the applications that need to be recovered in a disaster?

The Typical Process Today

One of the largest Data Center challenges during Disaster Recovery is seamlessly coordinating the multiple operational silos (i.e. server, network, storage, database) that exist.

A typical order of events during Disaster recovery for stakeholders in each silo is:

1. Detection, verification and notification of failure
2. Determine and agree on cause of failure
3. Determine and agree on solution
4. Escalate and obtain approvals to initiate fix
5. Agree that fix is successful

This end-to-end process is often poorly documented, difficult to test, and quickly becomes out-of-date with every application upgrade or technology refresh.

Our Solution

Enigmatec Automated Disaster Recovery (ADR). Working closely with our largest customers, we've developed and refined ADR to simplify all aspects of disaster recovery operations: workflow creation, deployment, management, testing and monitoring.

Learn more about the Enigmatec Automated Disaster Recovery solution