Enhancing Revenue Through Business Continuity

By Adam Eisner, theWHIR.com

From Web Hosting Monthly, April 2003 Edition

May 14, 2003 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Business continuity services provide corporations with the infrastructure necessary for physical and IT architecture recovery in the event of a disaster.

Comprehensive continuity services protect the assets, reputation and even the existence of a large enterprise if an emergency severely affects its operations. Managers have thus placed a high priority upon such services since the events of September 11. With the threat of domestic terrorism now constantly looming within the United States, Fortune 500 companies have been enacting practices, processes and procedures that mitigate disruption from terrorism and natural disasters.

Outsourced IT providers assist by offering specialized infrastructure that satisfies the continuity and recovery requirements of large businesses. Usually this infrastructure assumes the form of critical data backup and recovery services, which not only insure against terrorism, but against other more common occurrences such as hardware failure and data corruption.

Over the last year, business continuity planning has become a high priority as enterprises realize the full impact of downtime, which can cost on average more than $1 million per hour. According to Meta Group, business continuity capabilities remain a number-one spending priority. Today, fewer than 25 per cent of large enterprises have a business continuity plan in place. IDC however expects spending for IT security and business continuity solutions to grow from $66 billion in 2001 to $155 billion in 2006.

As a result, service providers have begun positioning themselves to capture a portion of the increasing business opportunities within the continuity services arena. With new federal U.S. regulations under review recommending that key industries incorporate out-of-region backup facilities for data and operations, it is only conceivable that business continuity services will continue to grow in necessity, and tangibly in deployment. Most of these services assume the form of data storage topologies over networks.

As organizations around the globe search for ways to improve the availability of critical enterprise data, they are increasingly turning to storage area networks (SANs). The SAN is an interconnection between several data servers and storage devices for the use of a larger user network. SANs provide functionality such as backup and restoration, retrieval and archiving and data migration from one storage device to another.

The practicality of SANs is that they prevent the tendency of an enterprise's network from bogging down while backup and retrieval functions are being performed. SANs are also becoming increasingly important since they provide data redundancy for the enterprise in the face of physical and cyber terrorist attacks.

SANs support synchronous data mirroring between primary and remote locations within the enterprise. In the event of a disaster such as critical data failure or physical or cyber terrorist attack, a redundant system can take over for the main system, accessing the mirrored data in a moment's notice. Due to the exponential growth expected in stored information, most industry analysts anticipate that much of this data, most of it corporate, will exist in a SAN topology in the near future. This is because storage network topologies can guard against the downtime caused by either logical or physical attacks, or by data and power failure.

To guard against such downtime and to reduce business risk, SANs are designed to eliminate single points of failure and to increase system resiliency and maximize data availability. All quality SANs thus incorporate "fail over" software to prevent or better tolerate system outages, and streamline data backup and recovery processes to reduce the time to recovery. Most importantly, SANs enable high-performance remote backup, electronic vaulting and mirroring of critical information at Internet data centers separated by great distances to ensure continuity of corporate data.

One such company that specialized in storage services such as SANs is Arsenal Digital Solutions (arsenaldigital.com). Arsenal's suite of outsourced storage management services eliminates the challenges and risks associated with managing complex, multi-vendor storage architectures and software point solutions. The company has developed send agents, encryption and authentication technologies that let the customer move data stored in an Internet data center between partners or employees.

The firm's set of business continuity services allows service providers and enterprises to outsource their disaster recovery capabilities, including backup and recovery. With Arsenal, enterprises can put business continuity solutions in place, thereby reducing storage costs and improving data accessibility. Arsenal makes its services exclusively available to service providers through private-label storage management solutions.

Network operators such as AT&T and Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN) hence private label Arsenal's storage management solutions and resell them to their own managed hosting clients. The solutions that Arsenal offers include remote backup solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery, remote storage management solutions, storage area networks, and high availability network attached storage solutions. The firm's services are meant to satisfy enterprises requiring multi-site data replication and backup to physically dispersed Internet data centers.

"One of the biggest challenges in the storage industry is to provide a vendor neutral capability in the most cost-effective fashion," stated Frank Brick, Chairman and CEO of Arsenal Digital Solutions. "Under one management console, we provide service providers the capacity to manage all the storage requirements of any major organization."

The firm already maintains storage infrastructure for over 700 firms, many of which hail from the Fortune 500. "The largest barrier of entry into new markets for hosting companies is trust," states Brick. "Our infrastructure management guarantees recoverability of data, allowing our partners to sell even more services to their customer base with confidence."

Offering business continuity services, such as a SAN, is a powerful option for the service provider that is seeking ways to 'strategically reinforce' its technological offerings in order to reduce churn. Hosting firms such as Verio already offer Arsenal's backup and recovery solution as a value-added managed service, allowing customers in Verio's hosting facilities to receive enterprise-class storage on a pay-as-you-use basis. The data backup and recovery includes all required hardware, software and associated maintenance.

The service offering includes daily incremental and weekly full backups, customer initiated restores, expert installation, implementation and operation, and flexible off-site storage options. The service operates across all hardware and software platforms, and provides the service provider the third-party services it needs to fortify its network operations from data loss, while creating new revenue opportunities.