Enterprises urged to use cloud failover during disasters

At the Business Continuity Management Conference in London yesterday, there was a great deal of discussion around how IT managers should best protect their infrastructure in the event of a natural disaster.

One speaker at the conference, Dr Geoffery Hayward, CTO of software vendor DataGardens, argued that the cloud and virtualisation can help enterprises limit the disadvantages associated with using either application or infrastructure protection, the traditional ways of insuring against such disasters.

Application protection, which is used to minimise downtime and data loss, focuses on the software. So, for example, a company would have an application running in its live production site, but also have it running in a standby protection site.

The problem is that this approach focuses on specific applications, meaning it doesn't easily cover a variety of applications in an enterprise. It is also costly because it means running several live sites at the same time.

"There are a lot of costs associated with application protection," said Hayward.

"You effectively double the cost of having one production site, as your protection site is always active whether you use it or not. This sucks up memory and resources."

A second traditional approach is infrastructure protection, which is an application-agnostic, enterprise-wide solution. This focuses on servers, network and storage.

"The benefits of infrastructure protection are that it relies on a passive-protection site, so you don't fire it up until you need it. The data isn't moved across until disaster strikes," said Hayward.

"However, the recovery procedures are complex, brittle and need to be tested regularly. The process of shutting down the production site, but at the same time firing up the passive site and transferring everything over, is difficult to get right," he added.

"For example, you have to be very careful to reconfigure all the network settings correctly."

However, a third alternative to these options has emerged in the past couple of years, owing to the advancement of virtualisation – and this new type of protection is called process protection.

This is where the actual business processes are protected, as opposed to the infrastructure or applications, which means it protects what is going on 'in-memory' with the computing functions.

Hayward explained that to do this you have to protect the 'active state', which he described as the memory of the computers and the goings on in the processes themselves.