Chapter 19: Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity in the On-Demand Access Environment

OVERVIEW

Hurricane Katrina and the Florida hurricanes of 2005 continued increasing the spotlight on disaster recovery and business continuity begun after the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing . Unfortunately, many people think of these events and assume that it will never happen to them. Indeed, statistically, most organizations will never experience a major geopolitical or natural disaster. On the other hand, the likelihood of business interruption due to normal day-to-day activities such as employee turnover , database maintenance, power fluctuations, file maintenance, and component failures is nearly guaranteed .

According to a 2003 survey by EMC/Roper ASW, two- thirds of U.S. business executives believe they would resume normal operations within 24 hours, while their IT executives put the figure at three days. The statistics show that both groups are over-optimistic:

• – A Gartner report estimates that two out of five companies that experience a disaster will go out of business within five years .

• – 43 percent of companies experiencing disasters never reopen, and 29 percent close within two years (McGladrey and Pullen).

• – One out of 500 data centers will have a severe disaster each year (McGladrey and Pullen).

• – Most companies value each 100 megabytes of data at more than $1 million (Jon Toigo).

Why the gap in expectations versus reality? The answer has largely to do with access. Without a viable access strategy in place, even sophisticated business continuity plans result in extended periods of downtime. Following hurricane Katrina, hundreds of thousands of employees were evacuated from New Orleans for long periods of time. While many organizations utilized data center recovery sites to successfully and quickly restore mission-critical applications and data, their employees were unable to work because their loaner PCs did not have the required client software installed and configured. On the other hand, the Citrix implementation of March of Dimes enabled employees to work in remote locations after March of Dimes offices were destroyed . This chapter will focus on how to utilize an on-demand access environment to provide full disaster recovery and business continuity within the realm of business possibility for large and small businesses alike.

It is important to note that even smaller organizations will benefit from the discussion in this chapter. Many small companies feel that they cannot afford server redundancy, let alone data center redundancy. Although this chapter will focus more on a mid- sized organization plan, these same best practice approaches will apply to even the smallest customersjust on a lesser scale. Even a home-based workstation with a large hard drive configured to mirror data from the main corporation, stationed next to a single Citrix Presentation Server to handle remote access, will dramatically reduce the risk of severe business loss in most disaster scenarios.