Getting to grips with SMB resilience

Andrew Buss looks at using virtualisation to improve business continuity

It is recognised across most companies that disasters can interrupt business processes, and that it is important to be prepared to resume operations in a timely way if the worst should happen.

While this awareness is widespread, the results of one of our recent surveys suggested that most SMBs realise their ability to recover from disaster is nowhere near as comprehensive as it should be.

Only about a quarter of SMBs participating in our research had formal disaster recovery (DR) plans. Most had less formal measures in place to get a recovery under way after a major incident. And, countering the belief in widespread ignorance and apathy, only about one in six organisations surveyed said they do not spend a lot of time thinking about risk management in this area.

However, the lack of specific focus means many SMBs manage DR as a diffuse part of a broader set of IT operations. When juggling competing priorities, investment may be less available to address existing weaknesses in resilience.

So standalone DR initiatives will be quite rare. You can drive sales by helping prospects crystallise their business needs and commit funding for DR projects. This is possible, but it can be a difficult and lengthy sales cycle, because you first need to convince the customer to create an overarching DR initiative.

Or perhaps expand the remit of other projects, through up-selling and cross-selling, to include DR. This approach will often be easier because budget is already committed, although it does require identification of the most appealing initiatives.

There are many potential areas to focus on when cross-selling DR, although these areas are often not seen as particularly relevant by default, or tend to have perceived implementation issues.

Ask how to tap into virtualisation activity that is already happening or under consideration. Despite the hype of virtualisation over the past five years, virtualisation remains more the exception than the rule in SMBs. Less than one in five respondents indicated they had virtualised more than half their x86 server infrastructure. More than half said there had been little to no virtualisation.

It may seem that selling virtualisation-enabled DR is a lost cause, due to a lack of interest. But SMB virtualisation is set to rise in the next few years.

Prospective customers have already warmed up to the idea of virtualisation. In many cases, projects will also be starting almost afresh, allowing more freedom to shape the proposed solution or use case, rather than simply trying to retrofit.

Just where can virtualisation help enable DR? There are a number of areas where SMBs view it as helpful. The principal benefit for most is having a much more flexible approach to restoring services by being able to recover to alternative hardware. This can be further exploited by allowing recovery in the cloud by restoring to standby machines hosted in an external facility.

Other benefits that virtualisation is seen to bring to DR are the simplification and the speeding up of the recovery process.

To take advantage, a good fit between DR and virtualisation skills and experience is necessary. However, these are limited in the SMB space, which means that skills particularly in Microsoft, but also in VMware and Citrix, will be important to enabling successful implementations.

The bottom line is that many SMBs have little awareness of the offerings available to them that will help both improve their ability to deal with DR scenarios and better protect data in daily IT operations. By building a DR practice and associated propositions on top of virtualisation, you can take advantage of the coming wave of adoption.

Andrew Buss is service director at Freeform Dynamics