Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are important aspects of any organization. Being proactive before a disaster strikes is important. If you don’t have a plan, it’s time to develop one. If you do have a plan, it might be time to examine if it’s current and meeting today’s needs and demands.

Organizations should consider three primary aspects of BC:

• High availability: Keeping the environment running, even if a single component fails. Individual servers and storage often have redundant components, designed for no single point of failure. Server and storage systems can also be clustered, so that any system failure doesn’t bring down the environment.

• Continuous operations: The ability to perform routine operations without having to plan for shutdown. This includes taking online backups of databases, adding or upgrading hardware capacity, or upgrading firmware or software on running systems.

• DR: The ability to recover an environment after an unplanned outage occurs. This may be at a different location, or to the same location after the problems have been resolved.