Clustering Simplified Archives - Page 48 of 104

Minimizing Downtime with High Availability

January 29, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Minimizing Downtime with High Availability

Downtime has become more costly than ever before for modern businesses. The ITIC 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey found that in 91% of organizations, one hour of downtime in a business-critical system, database, or application costs an average of more than $300,000, and for 18% of large enterprises, the cost of an hour of downtime exceeds $5 million.

High availability (HA) is an attribute of a system, database, or application that’s designed to operate continuously and reliably for extended periods. The goal of HA is to reduce or eliminate unplanned downtime for critical applications. This is achieved by eliminating single points of failure by incorporating redundant components and other technologies in the design of a business-critical system, database, or application.

SLAs and HA Metrics

Service-level agreements (SLAs) are used by service providers to guarantee that a customer’s business-critical systems, databases, or applications are up and running when the business needs them.

IDC has created an SLA model that defines uptime requirements at five levels as follows:

AL4 (Continuous Availability – System Fault Tolerance): No more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds of planned and unplanned downtime per year (99.999% or “five-nines” availability)
AL3 (High Availability – Traditional Clustering): No more than 52 minutes and 35 seconds of planned and unplanned downtime per year (99.99% or “four-nines” availability)
AL2 (Recovery – Data Replication and Backup): No more than 8 hours, 45 minutes, and 56 seconds of planned and unplanned downtime per year (99.9% or “three-nines” availability)
AL1 (Reliability – Hot Swappable Components): No more than 87 hours, 39 minutes, and 29 seconds of planned and unplanned downtime per year (99% or “two-nines” availability)
AL0 (Unprotected Servers): No availability or uptime guarantee

According to ITIC, 89% of surveyed organizations now require “four-nines” availability for their business-critical systems, databases, and applications, and 35% of those organizations further endeavor to achieve “five-nines” availability.

In addition to uptime and availability, two other important HA metrics are Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). RTO is the maximum tolerable duration of any outage and RPO is the maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated when a failure happens. Unlike RTO and RPO metrics for disaster recovery which are typically defined in hours and days, RTO and RPO metrics for business-critical systems, databases, and applications are often only a few seconds (RTO) and zero (RPO).

HA Clustering

HA clustering typically consists of server nodes, storage, and clustering software.

Traditional Clustering

A traditional, on-premises HA cluster is a group of two or more server nodes connected to shared storage (typically, a storage area network, or SAN) that are configured with the same operating system, databases, and applications (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Traditional server clustering with shared storage

One of the nodes is designated as the primary (or active) node and the other(s) are designated as secondary (or standby) nodes. If the primary node fails, clustering allows a system, database, or application to automatically fail over to one or more secondary nodes and continue operating with minimal disruption. Since the secondary node is connected to the same storage, operation continues with zero data loss.

However, the use of shared storage in the traditional clustering model creates several challenges, including:

The shared storage itself is a single point of failure that can potentially take all of the connected nodes in the cluster offline.
SAN storage can also be costly and complex to own and manage.
Shared storage in the cloud can add significant, unnecessary cost and complexity and some cloud providers don’t even offer a shared storage option.

SANless Clustering

SANless or “shared nothing” clusters (see Figure 2) address the challenges associated with shared storage. In these configurations, every cluster node has its own local storage. Efficient host-based, block-level replication is used to synchronize storage on the cluster nodes, keeping them identical. In the event of a failover, secondary nodes access an identical copy of the storage used by the primary node.

Figure 2: HA clustering with SANless or “shared-nothing” storage

Clustering Software

Clustering software lets you configure your servers as a cluster so that multiple servers can work together to provide HA and prevent data loss. A variety of clustering software solutions are available for Windows, Linux distributions, and various virtual machine hypervisors. However, each of these solutions limits your flexibility and deployment options and introduces various challenges such as technical complexity and expensive licensing.

Don’t Wait for Disaster to Strike

HA is crucial for business-critical systems, databases, and applications. But with the myriad platforms available, complexity ramps up significantly. That’s why an application-aware solution makes so much sense. What you need is a trusted partner who has extensive expertise in high availability—a partner like SIOS, which has the technological know-how to ensure that your business stays up and running.

Don’t wait for an outage or disaster to find out if you have the resiliency your business needs. Schedule a personalized demo today at https://us.sios.com to see what SIOS can do for your business.

Reproduced from SIOS

How to Protect Application and Databases – Oracle Clustering

January 25, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How to Protect Application and Databases – Oracle Clustering

Oracle Clustering Without RAC: What You Need to Know

What is an Oracle Cluster?

A failover cluster is a way of providing high availability protection for applications by eliminating single points of failure by running the same operating system and databases and applications on multiple servers all of which share the same storage or connect to storage that is continuously synchronized. Oracle runs on one of these servers, called the primary. If it fails, application orchestration software (clustering software) moves operations over to one or more secondary servers in a process called a failover. Since the primary and remote servers access the same or identical storage, the Oracle operation can continue with minimal recovery time or data loss. Many organizations consider Oracle to be the backbone of their operations, especially if they are using an Oracle-based SAP system or Oracle ERP System.

What is Oracle RAC?

Oracle’s clustering software is called Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). RAC “enables you to combine smaller commodity servers into a cluster to create scalable environments that support mission-critical business applications.” ^[1] With Oracle RAC, you can cluster Oracle databases and use Oracle Clusterware to connect multiple servers, so they operate as a single system.

While RAC was previously bundled with Oracle Database Standard Edition (at no extra charge), Oracle has now removed the RAC feature from Standard Edition from version 19c onward. You can purchase Oracle RAC for an additional cost with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Unfortunately, this means that any customer wanting to use RAC must upgrade to Oracle Database Enterprise or migrate to the Oracle cloud, both of which are substantially more expensive solutions than the Standard Edition.

SIOS provides a high availability Oracle clustering solution without upgrading to the Enterprise Edition, saving up to 70 percent on licensing costs.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux (Oracle Linux, Red Hat, SUSE)

The SIOS Protection Suite for Linux provides a tightly integrated combination of high availability failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies, protecting your Oracle database and applications from downtime and disasters. Unlike other clustering solutions that only monitor the server’s operation, SIOS LifeKeeper monitors the health of servers, network connections, storage, all Oracle processes, and any associated applications. Problems are immediately corrected via a set of policy-defined actions ensuring fast recovery without disruption to end-users.

SIOS Protection Suite can operate in a shared storage (SAN) environment to support a traditional HA cluster, or in a shared-nothing (SANless) storage configuration in cloud, hybrid, and other environments where shared storage is impractical or impossible. It delivers a robust, versatile, and easily configurable cluster with automatic and manual failover/failback recovery policies for your Oracle databases and applications.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux includes:

SIOS LifeKeeper, which provides flexible failover clustering software that monitors the entire application stack
SIOS DataKeeper, which provides fast, efficient host-based, block-level data replication for mirroring local storage in a SANless cluster configuration or replicating to remote locations or cloud for disaster recovery
Multiple Application Recovery Kits (ARKs), with automated configuration and validation tools built into the product to protect your business-critical applications and data from downtime and disasters.

SIOS LifeKeeper supports all major Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and Oracle Linux and accommodates a wide range of storage architectures. SIOS software has been adapted and optimized to run on these operating systems and the components are tested to ensure the SANless cluster solution will work on each OS.

SIOS Supports Oracle Clustering in the Cloud

With the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, you can run your Oracle applications in a flexible, scalable public cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, without vendor lock-in or sacrificing performance, high availability, or disaster protection.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux on AWS or Azure provides the elements you need to create a high availability Linux cluster across cloud Fault Domains and Availability Zones giving you geographical separation for protection from sitewide and regional disasters and outages.

In a Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) environment, you can use SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to synchronize local storage using efficient host-based replication for SANless clustering. SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software protects your business-critical Windows environments, including Oracle, from downtime and data loss.

SIOS Supports Oracle Clustering in Virtual Environments

SIOS SANless cluster software provides the enterprise-grade high availability, reliability, and flexibility needed for your Oracle databases and applications when operating in VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, and XenServer environments.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux protects your Oracle databases and applications running on Linux in a virtual environment. If you are running Oracle on Windows in a virtual environment, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition protects your business-critical Windows environments, including your Oracle databases and applications.

SIOS offers integrated data replication, high availability clustering and disaster recovery solutions supporting Oracle on both Linux and Windows to provide fault-resilient protection for small and large organizations alike at a fraction of the cost of other Oracle clustering solutions. With SIOS SANless clusters, you do not need expensive shared storage to achieve full high availability application and database protection. Instead, you can run your Oracle databases and applications in the cloud where there is no SAN. And, SIOS can protect your Oracle database and applications on-premises and in virtual and hybrid environments as well.

For more information on how SIOS can protect your Oracle databases and applications, click here or a personalized demo.

^[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/rac.111/b28254/admcon.htm#RACAD7148

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How to Protect Application and Databases – SAP Clustering

January 21, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How to Protect Application and Databases – SAP Clustering

SAP Clustering: The Best Way to Achieve High Availability

What is SAP Clustering?

Your SAP system is the lifeblood of your organization and if the system is down, your operations stop. To support high availability of your SAP system, your IT team can install SAP in a cluster environment.

A cluster is a group of two or more connected servers that are configured with the same operating system, databases, and applications. These connected servers are referred to as “nodes.” One of the nodes is designated as the primary node. If a primary node fails, clustering allows your organization to automatically fail over application operation to one or more secondary nodes, mitigating downtime, eliminating data loss, and maintaining data integrity.

High availability SAP clustering solutions are available for servers that run in Linux or in Windows environments.

SIOS Protection Suite Protects SAP in Linux Environments

The SIOS Protection Suite for Linux provides a tightly integrated combination of high availability failover clustering, continuous SAP application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies, protecting your SAP application from downtime and disasters. While SIOS Protection Suite can operate in a SAN environment to support a traditional HA hardware-based cluster, the architecture takes a shared-nothing approach to server clustering allowing it to run SANless. It delivers a robust, versatile and easily configurable solution with automatic and manual failover/failback recovery policies for a wide variety of applications.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Supports SAP Clustering as Follows:

SIOS LifeKeeper, which provides flexible failover clustering software that monitors the entire application stack
SIOS DataKeeper, which provides fast, efficient host-based, block-level data replication for mirroring local storage in a SANless cluster configuration or replicating to remote locations or cloud for disaster recovery
Multiple Application Recovery Kits (ARKs), with automated configuration and validation tools built into the product to protect your business-critical applications, such as SAP, and data from downtime and disasters.

Application Intelligence Maintains Best Practices Failover

ARKs provide application-specific awareness and connect the application stack to the HA solution in context, including all dependent components. For example, SIOS offers an SAP HANA Application Recovery Kit, which provides host auto-failover, storage replication, and system replication to increase availability.

Lastly, with the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, you can run your business-critical applications in a flexible, scalable cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, without sacrificing performance, high availability, or disaster protection.

SIOS DataKeeper Protects SAP in Windows Environments

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition is a software add-on that simply and seamlessly integrates with WSFC to add performance-optimized, host-based synchronous or asynchronous replication. With DataKeeper, you can easily create a SANless cluster to achieve high availability and disaster recovery for your SAP application, whether operating in the cloud, in a virtualized environment such as VMware, or on physical servers using only local storage. It adds efficient replication to synchronize local storage on each cluster node, creating a SANless cluster that appears to WSFC like traditional storage. With it, you can create a Windows cluster in a cloud, hybrid cloud, or extend a traditional on-premises SAN-based cluster with a node in the cloud for disaster recovery.

Using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, you can achieve high availability protection to critical SAP components including ABAP SAP Central Service (ASCS) Instance, back-end databases (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MaxDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL), the SAP Central Services Instance (SCS).

SIOS DataKeeper not only eliminates the cost, complexity, and single-point-of-failure risk of a SAN, but also lets you use the latest in fast PCIe Flash and SSD in your local storage for performance and protection in a single cost-efficient solution.

SIOS DataKeeper also provides SAP high availability and disaster recovery in cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services without sacrificing performance.

If your organization does not use WSFC, SIOS offers Protection Suite for Windows, which includes SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS LifeKeeper, and optional Application Recovery Kits (ARKs) for leading applications such as SAP, and infrastructure operations. It is a tightly integrated SAP clustering solution that combines high availability failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies to protect your business-critical SAP application and data from downtime and disasters.

Conclusion

Organizations across the globe use SIOS HA solutions to protect their SAP application, whether running in a Windows or Linux environment. Here are just a few examples:

Bonfiglioli is a leading Italian design, manufacturing and distribution company used SIOS DataKeeper to give them an easy way to move their SAP system to the Microsoft Azure cloud while meeting stringent SLAs for availability, disaster recovery, and performance.
Toyo Gosei, a chemical manufacturer, used SIOS DataKeeper to migrate SAP to Azure and build a “system that never stops” with replication.
Zespri International, the world’s largest marketer of kiwi fruit, used SIOS DataKeeper to provide the configuration flexibility and high availability and disaster protection the company needed to deploy their SAP/Microsoft SQL Server operations in Microsoft Azure.

For more information on high availability SAP clustering, click here.

References

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/03/high-availability-and-dr-for-sap-hana-sap-s-4hana-and-sap-central-services/

^[1] Ibid.

^[2] https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/03/high-availability-and-dr-for-sap-hana-sap-s-4hana-and-sap-central-services/

^[3] Ibid.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How to Protect Application and Databases – SQL Server Clustering

January 18, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How to Protect Application and Databases – SQL Server Clustering

Taking the Mystery Out of SQL Clustering Solutions With SIOS

SQL Server Clustering: The What and Why

SQL Server clustering is the term used to describe a collection of two or more physical servers (nodes), connected via a LAN, each of which host a SQL server instance and have the same access to shared storage. Clustering SQL servers provides high availability and protection from disasters whenever a server hosting the SQL Server instance fails.

If you are on a standalone server, a hardware failure can bring your operations to a halt. However, with clustering, if a node has problems, you can automatically failover to another node – with minimal downtime – and continue to let your users keep working while IT works to resolve the problem. When the primary server is fixed, you can quickly revert operations back.

When compared to using a stand-alone server, SQL Server clustering can also limit downtime when applying upgrades and security patches.

While SQL Server clustering provides high availability and minimizes system downtime, SQL Server clustering will not improve the performance of the servers or applications. To improve performance, you need to upgrade the computing power of the servers.

This article introduces SIOS SQL Server Clustering Solutions and provides a high-level comparison of SIOS versus Microsoft’s SQL clustering solutions.

SIOS SQL Server Clustering Solutions

SIOS Technology Corp. offers high availability clustering solutions that help you automatically recover from infrastructure and application failures. To support SQL Server high availability, SIOS offers two solutions:

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition runs on Windows and leverages Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to provide SQL Server clustering with shared storage (SAN) or without shared storage (SANless). A SANless environment eliminates single point of failure, improves replication efficiency, protects applications other than SQL Server, and protects distributed transactions and system databases.
SIOS Protection Suite for Linux is a tightly integrated combination of failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies to protect business-critical applications and databases, including SQL Server, in a SAN or SANless environment.

Let us take a closer look at the features and benefits of each solution.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) is a feature of the Windows Server platform that improves high availability. WSFC is commonly used to provide high availability for applications using SQL Server. In the event of a server or application failure, WSFC coordinates redundant computing resources and automatically manages the recovery of SQL Server operations and data on a standby node. Unfortunately, if you want to run your SQL Server application in the cloud, there is no SAN available.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition allows you to easily create a SANless WSFC to achieve high availability and disaster recovery for your SQL Server applications operating in the cloud, in virtualized environments such as VMware or Hyper-V, or on physical servers using only local storage. While WSFC manages the software cluster, SIOS cluster software synchronizes local storage using real-time (synchronous or asynchronous) block-level replication. The synchronized storage appears to WSFC as a traditional SAN-based storage. You can also build hybrid cloud configurations for disaster recovery protection between an on-premises data center and the cloud.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is fully certified by Microsoft and operates with Enterprise-Class availability in any configuration across cloud regions and zones.

SIOS SANless clusters not only eliminate the cost, complexity, and single-point-of-failure risk of a SAN, you can also use the latest in fast PCIe Flash and SSD storage for performance and protection in a single cost-efficient solution.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux includes:

SIOS LifeKeeper, which provides flexible failover clustering software that monitors the entire application stack; it orchestrates failover of the SQL Server application in compliance with best practices
SIOS DataKeeper, which provides fast, efficient host-based, block-level data replication for mirroring local storage in a SANless cluster configuration or replicating to remote locations or cloud for disaster recovery
Multiple Application Recovery Kits (ARKs) which provide application intelligence with automated configuration and validation to protect your business-critical applications and data from downtime and disasters.

While SIOS Protection Suite can operate in a SAN environment to support a traditional HA hardware-based cluster, it can also be used to create a shared-nothing approach to server clustering allowing it to run SANless. It delivers a robust, versatile, and easily configurable solution with automatic and manual failover/failback recovery policies for a wide variety of applications.

SIOS Versus Microsoft SQL Clustering Solutions

There are other SQL Server clustering solutions available on the market. Some of the most popular SQL Server clustering solutions are offered by Microsoft and include:

SQL Server Basic Availability Groups
SQL Server Always On Availability Groups
SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances with Shared Storage

SQL Server Basic Availability Groups runs on Windows and supports a maximum of a two-node cluster. It works like a database mirroring solution. While clustering and mirroring are both methods to improve high availability, mirroring only allows the database to failover. If you have other services, files, and other resources outside of SQL that you need after a failover, or if you have several databases that must stay together, clustering is the better solution.

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups runs on both Windows and Linux and according to Microsoft, it “provides an enterprise-level alternative to database mirroring.”^[1] It requires costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

You can save as much as 70 percent on software licensing costs and get enterprise-class clustering features by using SQL Server Standard Edition with SIOS’ SQL clustering solutions.

SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances with Shared Storage runs on both Windows and Linux. It is a single-site solution and requires a SAN.

Unfortunately, SANs are expensive to purchase and maintain, require SAN administrative expertise, and are a single point of failure. A SAN can also negatively impact database performance.

You can find a more detailed comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of SQL Server Always On, SQL Server Failover Cluster, and SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition here.

SQL Server Clustering in the Cloud

SIOS DataKeeper and SIOS Protection Suite for Linux provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for Windows and Linux applications respectively, operating in any combination of physical, virtual, cloud, or hybrid cloud infrastructures. For example, SIOS DataKeeper can:

Protect critical on-premise or hybrid business applications, including SQL Server, to high availability Windows or Linux environments in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Protect your SQL Server cloud application by creating a Windows or Linux cluster in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Provide sitewide, local, or regional high availability and disaster recovery protection by failing over SQL Server instances across cloud availability zones or regions.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition and SIOS Protection Suite for Linux both simulate clustered shared storage and can provide fully certified high availability cluster protection across cloud regions and availability zones.

Final Thoughts

SIOS provides offerings that support a breadth of applications, operating systems, and infrastructure environments, providing a single solution that can handle all your high availability needs. Here are just a few examples that demonstrate the power of SIOS.

PayGo (paygoutilities.com) implemented SIOS DataKeeper with WSFC to provide high availability for SQL Server on AWS.
A healthcare information service provider uses SIOS DataKeeper to protect their important SQL Server in more than 18 cluster nodes, eliminating bandwidth issues, improving data protection, and reducing downtime in their critical healthcare network environment.
Mavis Discount Tire uses SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to deliver high availability for their business-critical SQL Server.

If you are looking for a high availability/disaster recovery solution to protect SQL Server in either a Windows or Linux environment, you can find more information here.

See blog posts about SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery.

References

https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/1541/getting-started-with-sql-server-clustering/

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2012/02/introduction-sql-server-clusters/

^[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/always-on-availability-groups-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver15

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Why You Need Business Continuity Plans

January 13, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Why You Need Business Continuity Plans

FaceBook, Instagram And WhatsApp Just Had A Really Bad Monday

It’s the end of the work day here on the east coast and I see that the Facebook is still unavailable. Facebook acknowledged the problem in the following two Tweets.

I can pinpoint the time that Facebook went offline for me. I was trying to post a comment on a post and my comment was not posting. I was a little annoyed, and almost thought the poster had blocked me, or was deleting my comment. This was at 11:45 am EDT. 5+ hours Facebook for me is still down.

While we don’t know the exact cause of the downtime, and whether it was user error, some nefarious assault, or just an unexpected calamity of errors, we can learn a few things about this outage at this point.

Downtime Is Expensive

While we may never know the exact cost of the downtime experienced today, there are a few costs that can already measured. As of this writing, Facebook stock went down 4.89% today. That’s on top of an already brutal September for Facebook and other tech stocks.

The correction may have been inevitable, but the outage today certainly didn’t help matters.

But what was the real cost to the company? With many brands leveraging social media as an important part of their marketing outreach, how will this outage impact future advertising spends? Minimally I anticipate advertisers to investigate other social media platforms if they have not done so already. Only time will tell, but even before this outage we have seen more competition for marketing spend from other platforms such as TickTock.

Plan For The Worst-Case Scenario

Things happen, we know that and plan for that. Business Continuity Plans (BCP) should be written to address any possible disaster. Again, we don’t know the exact cause of this particular disaster, but I would have to imaging that an RTO of 5+ hours is not written into any BCP that sits on the shelf at Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.

What’s in your your BCP? Have you imagined any possible disaster? Have your measured the impact of downtime and defined adequate recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each component of your business? I would venture to say that it’s impossible to plan for every possible thing that can go wrong. However, I would advise everyone to revisit your BCP on a regular basis and update it to include disasters that maybe weren’t on the radar the last time you reviewed your BCP. Did you have global pandemic in your BCP? If not, you may have been left scrambling to accomodate a “work from home” workforce. The point is, plan for the worst and hope for the best.

Communications In A Disaster

Communications in the event of a disaster should be its own chapter in your BCP.

One Facebook employee told Reuters that all internal tools were down. Facebook’s response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said.

Multiple employees said they had not been told what had gone wrong.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-instagram-down-thousands-users-downdetectorcom-2021-10-04/

A truly robust BCP must include multiple fallback means of communication. This becomes much more important as your business spreads out across multiple building, regions or countries. Just think about how your team communicates today. Phone, text, email, Slack might be your top four. But what if they are all unavailable, how would you reach your team? If you don’t know you may want to start investigating other options. You may not need a shortwave radio and a flock of carrier pigeons, but I’m sure there is a government agency that keeps both of those on hand for a “break glass in case of emergency” situation.

Summary

You have a responsibility to yourself, your customers and your investors to make sure you take every precaution concerning the availability of your business. Make sure you invest adequate resources in creating your BCP and that the teams responsible for business continuity have the tools they need to ensure they can do their part in meeting the RTO and RPO defined in your BCP.