The terminology surrounding business continuity is changing. It began with ‘disaster recovery’ and evolved to ‘business continuity.’ Now, experts are focusing on ‘business resilience.’ Taking out an insurance policy against one-time catastrophic events is no longer sufficient. Today, the emphasis is on continuous service availability, rather than recovery.

That’s crucial because IT is focused on agility, innovation and rapid delivery of new services and applications. And, customers and employees expect 24×7 access from any location. In that dynamic environment, IT must aim to minimize disruption and downtime.

Achieving IT resilience helps eliminate the risk of lost revenue, lower productivity, poor customer experience and missed business opportunities.

Continuous Process

IT resilience takes account of the fact that most business disruption is caused by smaller, everyday events caused by human error, security breaches or power outages, for example. That makes it important to have a single view of all IT resources and to put automated processes in place to provide alerts as a basis for proactive response.

Delivering IT resilience does not depend on a single action; it is a continuous process that incorporates a number of essential steps.

Maintain Awareness

Resilience begins with awareness of all IT assets and their dependencies, together with information on assets that are critical to business performance and customer experience. Automated tools like VTG’s ZENfra™ reduce the time and complexity of discovering assets and their dependencies, and maintaining a single, up-to-date view of the entire infrastructure.

By building a complete picture and analyzing the business impact of potential failures, IT teams can prioritize proactive maintenance and recovery procedures.

It’s equally important to reduce the risk of disruption by eliminating single points of failure or migrating resources to the cloud to ensure continued availability or back-up in the event of a problem. Identifying risks to mission-critical assets is a priority for IT teams.

Proactive Response

An automated alert and notification system ensures that IT teams are quickly aware of any issues that might disrupt business processes. This enables a rapid response to ensure business continuity.

The IT team should use traditional business continuity and recovery planning processes to minimize disruption and maintain the highest levels of service availability to customers and employees.

Review and Improve

Adopting an IT resilience process helps maintain high levels of service availability, but it’s essential to carry out regular reviews to identify the causes of any problems and to identify areas for further improvement.

A commitment to continuous improvement helps increase resilience even further, as well as optimizing infrastructure performance and reducing maintenance costs.

As part of the resilience review process, IT teams should set and monitor performance standards for IT assets. ZENfra™ provides detailed analysis and reporting capabilities that can identify devices not performing at industry standards. The tool creates a variety of preset or customized reports that can be used to identify any anomalies based on best practice or pre-set standards.

With this level of reporting capability, you can be confident of maintaining control over your infrastructure at all times.

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If you would like to know more about ZENfra™ or our resilience services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.