By Bharat Thakrar, Head of BCM, Security Practice, BT Global Services

Now that we are a few months into the New Year, it is interesting to see what others are forecasting as key trends that will be shaping the Business Continuity agenda in the next couple of years.  Looking through analysts’ forecasts and key trends shows there is much consensus as well as a few surprises.  While it is clear the recession will continue to overshadow everything, and finances will remain under pressure for some time, there is also a realization that as the economy stabilizes, companies will need to move on from trying to squeeze further savings from IT budgets that are already wildly overstretched.

By far the most popular investment will continue to be in Server Virtualization – almost 80% of enterprises according to Forrester — because of the many advantages this offers, such as IT consolidation, which substantially helps reduce the number of physical servers required while increasing the utilization levels of remaining servers.  This in turn helps reduce hardware, power and maintenance costs and increases space utilization.

Also, by having each application effectively run within its own “virtual server,” one can prevent one application from impacting another when upgrades or changes are made.  Interestingly, one of the more notable pieces of research was the VMWare’s global customer survey which detailed the primary drivers for customers adopting virtualization technologies.  The results were quite revealing: increasing the server utilization ratio (i.e., server consolidation) was the second highest reason at 40%.  The most important objective noted to implement virtualization is to improve a company’s BC and DR – a reason indicated by 45% of the 676 global respondents in the VMWare study.

Closely related to server virtualization and often part of the same project is Storage Virtualization involving the pooling of physical storage from multiple devices via networking into what appears to be a single storage device managed centrally, which can lead to improvements in data backups, data archiving and provide data recovery more easily and in less time.

Looking ahead, Cloud Computing is second major trend forecasted for Business Continuity. While not dependant on it, virtualization technologies as well as data center services and fast, reliable and resilient networking infrastructures underpin the key cloud disaster recovery features such as the

• Ability to recover all workloads in the cloud
• Unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning
• On-demand services using Pay-per-use billing model
• Highly secure and reliable infrastructure

An example of Cloud Computing is the Virtual Data Center (VDC), a pre-provisioned, hosted data center environment that enables enterprises to create, deploy, monitor, and manage their own service through a self-service portal.  Enterprises considering VDC offerings should look for self-healing properties and an infrastructure that is inherently resilient, with integrity maintained using physical and local separation at all times.

The third trend of significance is Environmental Efficiency.  As in other sectors, green considerations are now playing an increasingly important role within the business continuity industry.  In fact, this is seen as the new holy grail which not only claims to minimize impact on the environment and therefore enhance the organization’s sustainability credentials, but the reduced footprint/space/power requirements also make a powerful argument in the investment business case.  It is therefore a foregone conclusion that vendors will increasingly use green criteria to differentiate their offerings

The importance of Email Continuity has been espoused within business continuity plans for a long time, and its criticality to businesses cannot be underestimated as staff, customers, partners, stakeholders, etc. need to be updated and kept in touch more urgently during a disaster then usual business circumstances.  The major hurdle with email recovery systems has been the lack of adequate protection at an affordable price.  Many continuity solutions provide only limited Outlook features during failover (that may last days or weeks) and may not support cache/online mode clients or Exchange applications.  It seems this is an area which is expected to be under increased focus, especially since, in certain data-critical industries, it is now often a legal obligation as well as a business necessity to ensure that no messages are lost.

The final continuity focus area is likely to be on Data De-duplication – a technology that claims to reduce data backup volumes by a factor of as much as 20:1 using a combination of hardware and software techniques to eliminate duplicate and redundant data.  Just as in the case of virtualization, effective de-dupe implementations can result in deep cost savings from a combination of reduced disk storage requirements and reduced bandwidth requirements.  If only unique new data is being transferred to the remote site, then the required WAN bandwidth and recovery objectives will be significantly reduced – which allows you to shave hours off your data backup and recovery times since only a twentieth of the data now needs to be protected.  

Clearly the above list is a reflection of the emphasis on cost savings that continues to dominate IT budgets priorities.  However, the smart money is definitely on incorporating these technologies into existing enterprise business continuity programs because not only will they contribute to reduced risk, recovery times, and environmental emissions — but the strength of some of the cost savings can easily justify the investment as so many companies have already shown.