Architecting Your Network to Avoid a Disaster

Every company that does business over the web, WAN, or through a data center must have a  plan to protect connectivity and assets in case any data center components fail. The key is having a good business continuity and disaster recovery solution in place. Over the last few months I’ve been working on a solution for architecting the network for disaster avoidance and recovery. I delivered a webinar about this just days before Hurricane Sandy landed on the East Coast. It’s not often that a topic is so relevant. As I watched the news a couple of days later it was shocking to see what happened to people’s neighborhoods. My first reaction was to hope that rescue efforts were underway and that people would be safe. As a few days went by I was wondering about how people were doing with getting their businesses up and running again. I wrote the need for good disaster planning in a blog in early September, see link.

What We Have Learned From Our Conversations
At Juniper we have talked with many organizations about their networks and their business continuity situation. I’d like to share some of what we learned. Many organizations tell us that they have grown organically and also through acquisitions. As a result they are concerned about inconsistent IT management policies. They have a range of applications from the organizations that they acquired and since they are often in high growth businesses and are adding applications for special projects they see server and application sprawl. Often a new CIO will initiate a process of checks on the infrastructure in an effort to see how they can normalize policies and streamline IT management. Sometimes the news of a natural disaster prompts a review the BC/DR plan.

Challenges Confronting the Organization
What organizations often find is that they are confronted with a number of challenges. They might build infrastructure without clearly identifying their application needs. This can result in poor SLA definition for applications, instead of having strict requirements with metrics. Many times they deploy infrastructure in an ad hoc manner without consistent policies. The result is many failure points, as well as difficulty managing the network and with provisioning it. Poor link utilization, with links that are frequently idle is another consequence. They often have a distributed authentication, authorization and enforcement infrastructure. The result is complex firewall policies that prevent user specific enforcement and that are deployed based on local Data Center IT policies, not global policies. These inconsistent policies for users and application access resulted in security holes.

Is it Time to Rethink Your Business Continuity - Disaster Recovery Plan?

Have you been thinking about the need to update your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan? You are not alone. According to recent research by The 451 Group disaster recovery planning is top of mind for the Enterprise and data replication is a top 2 storage initiative for IT organizations. Data replication has always been important but it was often seen as too expensive to implement. With virtualization technology data replication can be easier to implement than before and BC/DR is seen as a major motivator for implementing server virtualization. With virtualization in place you can replicate data at the Virtual Machine level. In many cases you can even put your database in a virtual machine. This makes it much easier to control the back up process and to keep track of your applications and data as well as to get them up and running at the new location.

Business Continuity is a Top Concern
It’s no wonder that BC/DR planning is getting more attention. We remember the outages and financial loss that occurred from disasters ranging from floods, to tornadoes and hurricanes to the tsunami in Japan. You have probably seen the statistics warning that 75% without business continuity plans fail within three years of a disaster, and 43% with no emergency plan never reopen. Government regulations have also dramatically increased the Data Replication and compliance requirements. These situations have increased the awareness of the need to maintain productivity within a company, sustain value chain relationships, deliver continued services to customers and partners, all of which can be difficult if we are moving applications and user connections to a new data center location.