When it comes to IT resiliency, few companies have a business continuity plan. A smaller portion of organizations have it written down, and even fewer test them.
This is why business continuity is the least understood pillar of resiliency, at least according to disaster recovery provider Sungard AS.
“Business continuity is defined as above and beyond the IT process, not as a server or piece of data or a file,” Anthony Kessel, senior director of product management at Sungard told CDN. “How do I tell my employees how what role to play, how to play it, that is something that people don’t think through.”
To the Wayne, Pennsylvania-based company, IT resiliency comes from a combination of four factors, namely security, disaster recovery, business continuity and the cloud.
While many clients tend to seek and many businesses only offer one type of solution, it’s important they realize all four are necessary to accomplish this goal, Kessel argued.
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A major obstacle to having such a plan, however, is that businesses view disaster recovery as insurance, in other words, an expense.
To overcome this, Sungard offers resilience testing, which Kessel said “turns [the model] upside down.”
“With testing, we become a secondary cloud for long-term use cases,” he said. He explained that as part of its services, Sungard tests patches before they are applied, and makes its resources available to production workloads.
In the long term, Kessel said that there is only one way to know whether your environment will withstand interruption.
“If you don’t test you will fail,” he said.