What Is Business Continuity

What Is Business Continuity?

Customers today expect products and services to be always-on and available on demand. Business continuity refers to your organization’s ability to maintain 24/7 availability in the face of disasters—both natural and human-made.

From power outages and floods to ransomware attacks—a business continuity plan can help you prepare for the worst and ensure your business can continue to operate and deliver optimal performance in the wake of an unexpected event. 

A business continuity plan typically includes:

• Disaster-recovery solutions and technologies
• Protocols for communicating issues to customers and stakeholders
• A plan of action in response to a wide range of disasters
• Workarounds for continuing business operations when certain assets or technologies are unavailable
• Policies on how to support employees during an emergency

Business continuity can get complicated fast, which is why many organizations develop a comprehensive business continuity management (BCM) program.

What Are the Benefits of Business Continuity Management?

The benefits of BCM include:

• Streamlined program administration
• Organizational agility to respond to and manage a crisis
• A well-defined IT disaster-recovery strategy for bouncing back from an incident
• A plan for investing in technologies that will allow your business to continue operations during a disaster

How to Ensure Business Continuity

While you can plan to respond quickly, your ability to ensure business continuity through a disaster is tied directly to the technologies within your IT infrastructure. Technologies you should consider incorporating into your business continuity strategy include: 

• Backups and snapshots to protect your data
• High-availability clustering to ensure uptime during disaster
• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to support the shift to an increasingly remote workforce
• Non-disruptive upgrades which allow you to update your systems without downtimes or migrations

How Pure Storage Factors Into Your Business Continuity Strategy

IT disaster-recovery technologies play a major role in BCM. As a pioneer in all-flash storage arrays, Pure Storage® is uniquely positioned to provide agile, disaster-resilient, data-storage infrastructure solutions that can help you maintain business continuity. Pure offers the following solutions for business continuity:

• Built-in protection against ransomware with FlashBlade® SafeMode snapshots
• Zero recovery point objective (RPO) and zero recovery time objective (RTO) with Purity ActiveCluster™
• All the benefits of a 100% NVMe storage array for speedy, reliable, and scalable VDI
• Truly non-disruptive upgrades with Evergreen™ Storage