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Reliable wans 'vital for disaster recovery'
Businesses have been advised to strengthen their disaster recovery strategies by ensuring the reliability of their wide area network (wan) infrastructure.
According to continuitycentral.com, vulnerable wan links can often impact on business functions and have the potential to seriously destabilise carelessly formulated disaster recovery plans.
With IP-based wans now the "default communication method" for many organisations, the issue of wan reliability is becoming increasingly crucial for businesses of varying sizes.
"The wan has assumed an ever-increasing role in supporting the automation of business applications such as order fulfilment and communications using email and VoIP," the business continuity portal states.
"Organisations that rely upon ISP connectivity need to take proactive measures to ensure the resiliency of their business, including their wan infrastructure."
Continuitycentral.com explains that, while a company can use its telephone system as back-up when email networks are down and vice versa, there is "nothing inherent" in a wan link to ensure that operations can continue during an outage.
This can have serious implications, as the website continues: "When the wan link goes down, there is the potential for all of the applications and network services to be unavailable, which can result in a major disruption to business and therefore loss of revenue."
In order to deal with the possibility of wan link outages, businesses may wish to consider a wan link controller, which can perform aggregation and immediately detect ISP or wan link failures.
Another growing area of the disaster recovery sector is virtualisation, with many firms now opting to strengthen their continuity position by adopting virtual servers and separate data centres.
Ian Dyson, director of trading group information services at the Co-operative Group, spoke to computing.co.uk about recent upgrades to the Manchester-based company's IT systems.
He explained that the building of a secondary data centre and ongoing plans to introduce desktop virtualisation were motivated by an awareness of disaster recovery requirements.
"The stability of the existing infrastructure was not ideal and we were reaching capacity at our data centre in Salford. We also needed to address disaster recovery and business continuity, and there is the green aspect as well," Mr Dyson said.
He also revealed that virtualisation may contribute to future flexible working initiatives at the Co-operative, because "virtual desktops can be migrated from floor to floor, office to office, and to people working from home".
More businesses are expected to follow the Co-operative's lead in this area, with a recent report from analyst firm Gartner predicting that virtualisation software revenue will increase by 55 per cent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa this year.
Ewen Anderson, director of the Centralis consultancy, told itpro.co.uk: "Virtualisation, having proven itself in the data centre for production use, is now moving into the realms of applications and desktops."
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