An effective Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery solution for ROBO sites must enhance output at each stage:

Provisioning
Recovery
Supervision
Management

These improvements have a direct and positive impact on operations, efficiency and business continuity.

Provisioning

Data consolidation is carried out entirely at the data center. IT personnel located at the data center with the aid of relevant tools perform provisioning. Earlier, all the data had to be replicated or transferred to the ROBO location before systems were restored. This was a time consuming exercise that would extend over many days and sometimes even weeks.

Today, the working set data for various processes can be intelligently forecasted and maintained in real time at the edge location. Transmission from the data center to the edge location is achieved over a highly fortified and secure tunnel.

Application size or distance between locations is no longer an issue while leveraging WAN connections. The time required to access both small and big applications at the edge location is the same. This way, time frames for provisioning tasks can be reduced from days and weeks to just minutes.

Once the application is up and running, the data center has to just emit the working set data to the edge location.

Management & Protection

After application provisioning and delivery has been achieved, the entire infrastructure is managed from a central dashboard located at the data center. The data center houses all the business data. The activity of taking data backups for each ROBO location is also carried out centrally from the data center. Backing up data for each ROBO application can be automated and staged through v Center integration and storage arrays at the data center to create uniform and standardized snapshots.

In the case of a conventional BCDR solution for ROBO environments, data copies would be required for each branch location which then gets replicated back to the data center as part of the DR exercise. This is usually done at the end of the day’s operations. So, for instance, if a natural disaster were to strike a ROBO location at 1 am and data is backed up every night at 3 am, the ROBO location would permanently lose 22 hours of business data.

Today however, with asynchronous data replication techniques, all branch data can be constantly copied from the ROBO site to the data center with a lag of just a few minutes. So if the same natural disaster were to occur at 1 am, almost all the data can be recovered from the data center. This means that recovery point objectives (RPO) for ROBO applications can be brought down from hours to a just a few minutes, even when confronted with an environmental hazard.

Recovery Measures

Outages impact all applications, regardless of whether they were forecasted or unexpected. Common causes include infrastructural flaws, catastrophes, data corruption and so on. Most organizations place a strong focus on quick recoveries in their business continuity plans.

In a conventional ROBO setup, computation and storage are maintained locally at each ROBO site. However, in the event of a failure, processes can’t be failed over to an alternate site as locally hosted applications need to be restored.

Resiliency and fault tolerance strategies today are multilayered and can be deployed from a central location to mitigate the impact of different types of business disruptions.

Infrastructural Failures at the Branch

Two nodes can be connected with direct communication between their respective controllers. In this setup, also known as a HA pair, each of the two systems can restore services on behalf of the partner system that has suffered an outage. This can be achieved automatically without IT administration getting involved.

The usefulness of the HA pair configuration can be extended to other non disruptive tasks and activities such as:

Hardware and Software upgrades and maintenance
Change of aggregate ownership of the nodes

Catastrophic Disruptions at the ROBO Location

Even if business operations are disrupted across the entire branch, they can be restored immediately at the data center and users can access systems remotely. The data center already holds all the consolidated data. So replication or retrieval of copies is not required. Live data can be accessed from the storage arrays at the data center for processing.

Through WAN optimization, applications and systems become highly responsive and perform at LAN speeds. The moment the branch location is up and running again, the updated data is transferred back to the branch office from where it is accessed instantly.

From a management perspective, this solution is fast, efficient and hardly requires any supervision.

Catastrophic Disruptions at the Data Center

Even when access to the main DC is disrupted, continuous data replication ensures that all the data is copied to the alternate DR site. Data is backed up at the remote location while simultaneously ROBO location operations are failed over seamlessly

In all of the above cases, the recovery time objective (RTO) time frames are brought down drastically and there is either no or negligible data.

Conclusion

The speed and scale of present day business transactions have made 100% availability for all services a matter of necessity. Growing customer needs means that 100% availability of systems should be device, location and time agnostic. The window for deploying upgrades, updates, enhancements, patches and fixes is constantly shrinking as IT teams work incessantly to meet business SLA targets despite outages and disruptions of catastrophic proportions.

Fortifying recovery measures at data centers has always been a major focus area in business continuity planning. However, the demand for BCDR plans that are contextually relevant to ROBO sites has seen a steady growth in recent times.

Now, even data center RPO and RTO targets can be achieved at the edge location by using a combination of resources at the data center and on the cloud. Applications are recovered and made available in a matter of minutes which translates into negligible downtimes for all ROBO services. And since data is constantly being replicated, there is virtually no loss of information.

The commercial benefits of this approach are many and varied.

Improved Data Center ROI – Initial investments on data centers yield better returns as storing, managing and protecting data is consolidated.

Federal and regulatory norms – Organizations need to strictly adhere to compliance and industry standards. Rules mandated by law also need to be followed. Consolidating data at the data center is effective from a physical, logical as well as a security perspective.

Operational Speed – Application and service delivery can be made faster when they are managed centrally. Besides, frequent change requirements can be implemented more efficiently from a central location than from local sites.

Technical Benefits

Protection – ROBO site data can be better protected through fortified physical and logical security strategies that are consolidated at the data center. End to end encryption can further secure all data with an additional layer of insulation.

Managing Data – Large volumes of data can be better handled when centralized tools manage applications across all ROBO locations. RPO and RTO time frames can also be improved when data is protected centrally.

Initiative Driven Visibility – The entire network can be better controlled when IT teams from the DC location have access to a panoramic view of all systems and their performance in real time across various metrics. Deviations from specific patterns, drops in output and outages can be identified and quickly resolved.

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