How To Ensure The Continuity Of IT Services

Companies need to adopt a set of four best practices aimed at ensuring disaster recovery technologies and its availability.

The technology is used to support policies for disaster recovery, but is not in itself a solution alone. Managers need to keep in mind that the strategy to manage this type of problem should be a continuous process, which should ensure a constant update of the initiatives and needs to be tested on a regular basis.

Furthermore, it is important to periodically update the impact analysis for business and raising risks as part of a specific strategy for disaster recovery. This proactive, rather than prepare the company for possible problems, tends to save a substantial money from organizations in the long term. And companies that adopt this model can replace the term ‘disaster recovery’ for ‘continuity of IT services’.

Anyway, companies have become increasingly dependent on IT every day and in return, business managers require a higher level of availability of equipment and systems. What force technology teams to reevaluate their strategies for both the continuity of IT services and to improve service to users in the organization.

In addition, the CIO needs to balance another aspect: maintain or reduce costs. Both need to justify any new investment in the availability, separate them according to their criticality to the business.

Below, I list the best practices to ensure the continuity of IT services:

1. Rank the systems according to their criticality
2. Develop classes of services that ensure both the availability and continuity
3. Assess the availability of services from the perspective of the user
4. Include considerations of availability and continuity in the development phase and testing applications.