Part of the reason companies are reluctant to go forward on enterprise-wide business continuity solutions is the complexity associated with implementing them. Enterprise-wide business continuity solutions typically rely upon a conglomeration of point products to protect and recover data. Backup software, host and storage system-based replication software and application specific replication software, among others, are just some of the software products that companies use.
The trick is configuring, managing and monitoring these point products in such a way that they work together in a cohesive, unified manner. Not only is this nearly impossible to do, the cost and complexity of performing these tasks can quickly escalate when trying to manage and recover multiple applications across the enterprise at the same time.
The fundamental flaw that exists with using point products to deliver enterprise business continuity is they tackle it from an application, server or storage system viewpoint. This is an incomplete view considering the multitude of applications, operating systems and storage systems that exist in companies today and the unknown relationships and dependencies that exist between them. Trying to do one-to-one matches of specific point products to specific applications, operating systems or storage systems is unrealistic and will not deliver the desired outcome: an easy to manage, enterprise-wide business continuity solution with a centralized management vantage point.
This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that these point products are not managed by a common console or the same person. When all of these factors and costs are added in, companies need to ask the obvious question, “Why are we doing this and will it work?” Because at the end of the day, companies spend a pile of money to purchase all of these solutions with little or no assurance that they can recover from a disaster should one occur.
While one may expect organizations to take this more holistic view of business continuity, that is easier said than done. There are a thousand and one minor issues that executives, storage managers and IT staffers deal with on a day-to-day basis that are required to run an organizations’ internal IT operations. In performing these tasks, it is easy for the responsibility of creating and executing on a vision that an enterprise-wide business continuity solution requires to slip through the cracks. It is also quite possible that these same individuals do not believe that such an enterprise-wide business continuity solution exists so they don’t even bother looking for one.
In this respect, InMage Systems‘ Scout provides companies with a mechanism to create and execute on converting a vision of enterprise business continuity into a corporate reality. Though Scout supports heterogeneous application, server and storage environments, it also meets head-on the tactical issues that companies have on deal with a day-to-day basis in order to deliver on the vision of enterprise business continuity.
You can’t introduce and manage enterprise business continuity software while neglecting daily tasks like backup and recovery, creating copies of data for testing and developing, or migrating data between DAS, NAS or SAN-attached storage platforms. Using Scout, you no longer have to. Scout provides enterprises the ability to perform and manage all of these functions through one interface. In the process, companies can create and execute on a vision of building an enterprise-wide business continuity solution without taking their IT staffers away from the day-to-day tasks that keep their companies up-and-running.