The Cloud Makes It Rain Money: The Business in Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 370

Business Continuity in the Cloud
Generally, business continuity is a set of planning and preparatory activities intended to
ensure uninterrupted operation of organization's critical business functions despite disrup-
tive events or disasters. Business continuity includes three key elements:
Resilience Critical business functions and infrastructure are designed and engineered to
transparently handle disruptions such as, for example, replicated systems and redundant
capacit y.
Recovery Arrangements are made for restoring critical business functions.
Contingency Readiness capability is established to cope with disruptions, disasters, and
other major incidents. This is generally a last-resort response if resilience and recovery
arrangements prove to be inadequate.
Business continuity is a crossover of a few interconnected and related fields such as
management, governance, information security, and compliance. Risk and business impact
analysis are core considerations and usually drive the priorities, planning, preparations,
and management activities.
A general approach that works for business continuity is to combine redundancy in
design with automation in cloud management. The architecture needs to withstand fail-
ures of individual components, including individual nodes. Each component then needs to
be considered independently and designed with the realities of data center infrastructure,
bandwidth, cost, and performance in mind.
The next step is to decide which parts of the system can respond automatically to fail-
ures and which parts cannot. The challenge is to seamlessly fail over to another component
and keep operations running if a disk drive, server, network switch, SAN, or an entire geo-
graphical region goes down. Operational excellence is determined by automation.
To achieve the maximum level of automation, the design requires that the components
and configuration is easily replaceable. Servers, for instance, need to be redeployable in a
predictable way across heterogeneous cloud infrastructures.
Companies can practice outage scenarios and how to respond to them by
doing artificial drills from time to time. Open-source tools are also avail-
able to help simulate component failures and mass system outages.
Procedures, standards, supporting policies and guidelines, and program develop-
ment are all foundations of business continuity practice. In order to be equipped to
tackle wide-scale or elongated disruptions and disasters, all system design, engineering,
implementation, support, and maintenance should be based on these foundations. This
coherent practice of business continuity and disaster recovery across all levels of an
organization will help in minimizing damage and loss and achieving maximum opera-
tional ability amidst chaos.