Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe.
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
Let’s talk a little about some common terms in the Software Industry :
- High Availability
- Redundant Systems
- Disaster Recovery
- Business Continuity
I believe all these terms have different meanings, and sometimes nearly always they are confused.
High Availability
The system or service is capable of responding to request with a near certainty of a valid response, or as often phrased "characteristic of a system which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime"
Redundant Systems
Any one end point to the system or service may experience outages, but other endpoints will still be available
Disaster Recovery
At some point after a disaster the system or service will become available again, possibly with missing data or diminished capabilities
Business Continuity
The process of ensuring that no matter what, your customers are confident in your ability to deliver the system or service to them.
High availability is not Business Continuity
So what does it take to ensure Business Continuity in a software company?
I had some thoughts
4 responses to “High Availability is not Business Continuity”
I can go on for hours about HA, versus having BCPs, versus backups. One can have a ton of HA… and the company will get tanked due to bus factor on sysadmins.
Or, a company spends a lot of dough doing redundant Oracle replication… only to find they can’t really effectively restore when some dev does a DROP TABLE in prod.
You make a good and relevant point here which is that HA doesn’t protect you from operator error!
I agree, I remember the courses I had in Uni about HA and it was definitely defined as BC. I also noticed that when people talk about HA and BC they ignore the effect of cost.
Definitely! True business continuity is a costly endeavor, but without it one disaster (Ransomware?) can kill your company