DRP AuditMany of the technologies you have already installed or may be considering as you push to make your overall operations more efficient will also, with appropriate forethought and design, support business continuity and disaster recovery.

For example, network resource virtualization, which automatically assigns and reassigns resources based on network loads, can help you make the most of your existing infrastructure investments while supporting flexibility. Autonomic computing capabilities scan networks, monitoring for problems and breaches, and automatically fix many problems as they arise. They can make infrastructures and applications more resilient and reliable, helping maintain service levels while reducing the load on IT staff.

Business ContinuityParallel computing, by adding more processing power to your network, is another technology that can increase availability and support intensive datacrunching needs. Regardless of your vulnerability to a disaster, supplementing traditional, tape-based systems with digital backup systems and storage area networks that do not need a physical connection to your infrastructure can be a good business move.

Managed hosting opportunities provide another way for companies to leverage advances in networking technologies. By outsourcing key business continuity, data center, backup

and recovery operations to qualified providers, organizations can focus resources on their core business.

Although contemplating a comprehensive approach to business continuity may seem overwhelming, you can build a resilient organization incrementally. Begin with a comprehensive assessment of where you are and where you want to go. You’ll need to measure your own plans and capabilities against some of the gaps and shortfalls enumerated at the beginning of this paper, including the need to plan for a disaster that might be regional in scope.

With those gaps in mind, identify the business processes without which your enterprise, customers and partners couldn’t survive. Which of those processes will you need to restore first? What steps can you take in the meantime to reduce your vulnerability to disaster, make your daily processes more efficient and deliver an ongoing return on your business continuity investment?

After you’ve assessed your readiness in the areas on which you want to focus, you’ll need to weigh both the availability and the recovery sides of the equation.

Consider the value of open source applications and systems in helping you build a resilient, scalable environment that can respond robustly to a variety of business challenges and disruptive events. Evaluate managed hosting and data center options to keep your costs of ownership low and your innovation quotient high. Investigate electronic data management options as a way to protect both your daily data access and your restoration needs.

Next, develop your continuity plan and implement the procedures that support it. Validate your program — repeatedly — through scenario testing. When your plan is deployed and your networks are integrated, consider redirecting resources toward differentiating business

activities by outsourcing the management of your business continuity program and service levels.