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EXPLORING THE MANY AVENUES FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Techniques for business continuity, which have basically consisted of high availability mechanisms and real-time data replications, may soon be radically affected with the advent of various new technologies.

One such method regards the way business continuity is constructed within an organization and involves moving all spheres of business into one major group. For instance, security, communications, emergency planning, etc would all be looked at from a single vantage point. This would then allow for more effective continuity management. In addition, this would alleviate the problem of separate departments all thinking that mission critical tasks are being handled by someone else. In this sense, communication and information would be better shared among an organization's departments.

Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit www.gt04.com.

Grid computing is here!

Though talked about for years, the convergence of information technology and communications is just now beginning to come to fruition. Many companies, with the new research developments in Internet Protocol, are beginning to adopt Voice over IP networks. And SAN and WAN implementations are helping to open up the possibilities for further business continuity ventures.

VoIP, or Voice over IP, combines telecom and IT business spheres. And though its risky initial concept caused ambivalence, more businesses are realizing that telecoms can achieve high availability by benefiting from IT's failover techniques.

Storage Area Networks, or SANs, based on Internet Protocol offer centralized data storage and increased control over backup, recovery and availability of that data. The data can be made available to any location in the world through the use of IP and its centralization guarantees increased protection and availability. Above all, only data continuity plan is needed to protect the data center that houses the data.

Wide Area Networks, or WANs, based on IP provide for network resilience. Recovery facilities can be based all over the world to help minimize the effects of a wide area disaster.

IBM is working on a new technology with its autonomic computing initiative, heretofore known as Project eLiza. IBM hopes to create machines that can manage themselves, similar to the human nervous system which constantly works to stabilize proper working order and longevity. IBM believes four main characteristics must be involved with all autonomic computing systems, namely ones that can self-heal, self-optimize, self-protect, and self-configure.

Autonomic computing would allow business continuity to become more automatic and efficient in terms of disaster recovery and failover.

Sun, with its N1 strategy, is attempting to gain the lead in the Grid computing arena. The strategy is hoped to allow for any number of computers (n variable) to be controlled as one. Grid computing, because it connects individual computers together as elements of a larger supercomputer, allows for the ultimate in high availability and increases resiliency to anything other than a complete catastrophic disaster. This means big things for major corporations where data center operations are crucial. While individual offices will still require conventional disaster recovery for their power supply, their fixed communications and their people, the need for data protection and recovery will be removed.

In utility computing enterprises treat computing resources in a similar way as any other utilities, such as power, the public telephone system, water, gas etc The computing utility provider offers the service – such as applications provision or data storage and backup for example - and bears the responsibility for the availability of that service. This is significant to the business continuity arena in a number of ways. Firstly, the onus is on the utility computing suppliers to ensure that the applications being utilized are always the latest version, with the latest vulnerability patches installed. This should increase the overall quality of the software being used across enterprises and takes away the headache of patch management.

Utility computing should also result in a sharing of the business continuity burden, since the utility provider will have a reputational requirement and a contractual duty to ensure that the services provided are highly available and protected by strong business continuity measures.

Ten years time – the ultimate system? The above developments are operable now, even if some are still in the testing stage. The next couple of years should see all of these becoming mainstream elements of company IT, but what of the longer term future? Many of today’s technologies were pipe dreams ten years ago. Which of today’s dreams will become reality?

The biggest change may be the privatization of the Internet. Enterprises may have their own ‘IP Sphere’, within which sits most of the data and applications that the enterprise requires. This will essentially be an externalization of today’s Intranets with enterprises utilizing Internet nodal points around the world to manage and operate their own private Internet. Gateways will be maintained to the public Internet but these will be well protected by enterprise firewalls and intelligent virus and content protection applications. Computers within the IP Sphere will no longer require their own protection. This will ensure that all machines operated by the enterprise will always adhere to IT protection and security policies.

Within the IP Sphere the enterprise will connect all its machines together in a grid, to ensure maximum manageability and control as well as extreme resilience of the network as a whole.

Both enterprise servers and individual machines down to desktop level will all benefit from autonomic technologies, resulting in maximum uptime. All applications will be operated across the IP Sphere from a central enterprise application hub, based on the utility computing mode. All data will be stored on an IP-Storage Area Network, again contained within the IP Sphere.

Telecommunications will use VoIP through the IP Sphere, with voice links to the external public Internet again strongly protected by intelligent firewalls which, as well as blocking VoIP spam, viruses and other threats, will continuously scan the content of voice calls, immediately blocking conversations which do not match the profile of allowable voice calls, as set out in the corporate communications policy.

Finally, enterprise services will be operated from a central data center, which will be supported by a secondary mirrored data center located many miles from the primary data center, providing a final tier of resilience against major disaster.