Chapter 19: Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity in the SBC Environment


Overview

Disaster recovery and business continuity jumped into the spotlight in the wake of the September 11 terrorist strikes, 2001 California power outages, and 2003 East Coast blackout. 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. We see customers almost daily who have experienced significant loss due to these far more common occurrences.

A large number of studies have been published on this topic, with some very interesting statistics emerging. Some of the more telling statistics are

  • 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).

With this much industry agreement, the question is not whether to plan for disaster, but rather how to plan for disaster, and how much to spend on the plan. This chapter will focus on how to utilize a server-based computing 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-size organization plan, these same best practice approaches will apply to even the smallest customers—just 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 MetaFrame server to handle remote access will dramatically reduce the risk of severe business loss in most disaster scenarios.




Citrix Metaframe Access Suite for Windows Server 2003(c) The Official Guide
Citrix Access Suite 4 for Windows Server 2003: The Official Guide, Third Edition
ISBN: 0072262893
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 158

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