Business continuity for SMEs is about efficient storage

SMEs have less cash but may look more favourably on business continuity planning this year, says Abhik Mitra

Mitra: Purse strings may be loosening on business continuity

When organisations are looking at business continuity, they are really looking at a full spectrum of services that protect their businesses by ensuring quick and efficient data access.

Protecting data becomes just as important as being able to retrieve it when the need arises.

VMware made business continuity synonymous with virtualisation, categorising it as data protection, high-availability and disaster recovery.

Users may need one or all three, but choosing to ignore them all could be fatal for an organisation. I have heard many companies that suffer a significant data loss typically find themselves out of business within five years.

SMEs often find themselves having to allocate a large portion of a limited budget to any business continuity plans.

They have access to various tools for advanced data protection and high-availability, but for many that’s where the complexity and costs start.

Organisations also need shared storage, such as a fibre channel or iSCSI dedicated SAN. Advanced VMware features such as VMotion, VMware HA and Daily Resource Scheduler (DRS) are meaningless without it.

Unsurprisingly, vendors have focused on lower-end SAN to address the need. Newer technologies such as storage virtual appliances (SVAs) may also help smaller organisations.

More SME IT administrators may convince their boards this year about the necessity to allocate IT budgets to SAN. Who knows, business continuity planning may become a reality for SMEs after all.

Abhik Mitra is product marketing manager at StorMagic