Business Continuity (BC) is the capability of an organization to continue delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruptive incident. Most enterprises have a BC practice in place with IT playing a central role. Traditional BC practice is expensive because it involved setting up a secondary datacenter that replicates the primary datacenter’s capability.
 
Increased cloud adoption has put new pressures on IT departments to keep business workloads available in the event of a disaster, whether these workloads are running on premises or in the cloud. To add to that pressure, acceptable system recovery times are shrinking from days down to hours and acceptable data loss windows have decreased from hours to minutes for critical applications. With these heightened expectations, budgets and staffing needed to manage business continuity have not kept pace with the demand of shorter recovery response and recovery times.
 
With recognition of cloud computing as an alternative to traditional physical datacenter, vendors are starting to market disaster recovery (DR) services in the cloud.
 
HP announced enhancements to the HP Helion Continuity Services offering, a cloud-based Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution, that substantially decrease the downtime, data loss and cost impact of a system outage while expanding availability to additional markets. To improve availability for clients and better address customer regional regulatory requirements, HP is providing this service from seven recovery centers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
 
To get a copy of the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines click here.
 
Watch a short four minute video to hear about the importance of Business Continuity Management: