Business Continuity Service Level Protection

Today's businesses have to support global operations, meet demanding compliance requirements and manage ever-growing data volumes. Companies of all sizes now require high data availability and quick recovery from downtime in order to stay competitive. Unplanned downtime or disruptions can have significant consequences, such as:

• The erosion of customer loyalty.

• Damage to brand or company reputation.

• Loss of revenue due to disruption of business processes.

• Loss of critical data.

• Reduced productivity of employees and critical resources.

• Compliance failures and other legal consequences.

To address these growing needs for data and storage protection, IBM has developed a comprehensive solution that can help companies achieve higher levels of data and storage availability, and to recover more quickly after a disruptive event. IBM's business continuity service level protection solution can help companies align storage management technologies and processes to business requirements, with offerings that range from traditional backup and restore technologies to high-performance backup and restore capabilities for mission-critical applications. Delivered through IBM Tivoli® software and IBM Global Technology Services, this solution can be tailored to the unique needs of each environment.

IBM's Business Continuity Service Level Protection solution can help you:

• Improve your business continuity posture by applying service level management concepts to your data protection needs.

• Align storage management technologies and processes more closely to business requirements, enabling prioritized recovery responses and better use of resources.

• Enable your company to achieve higher levels of data and storage availability, and to recover more quickly after a disruptive event.

• Combine industry-leading business continuity technologies and implementation services to provide a solution that meets your organization's business needs.

• Build a foundation for continuous improvement, where performance can be accurately measured against established recovery objectives.

Mitigating disruption through storage service levels
Service level management is a proven method to help ensure that IT organizations consistently meet or exceed business requirements for performance and availability. When applied to the discipline of managing data and storage, service level management is an effective approach to help companies mitigate the impact disruptions can have on data availability.

Using IBM's business continuity service level protection solution, you can more effectively apply service level concepts to your data protection strategy-and improve your business continuity posture. The solution supports service level protection processes throughout the discover, align, assign, and protect phases shown below:

Applying service level protection to your storage infrastructure can improve your business continuity posture by addressing key concerns throughout the process.

The IBM technologies and implementation services available through the business continuity service level protection solution enable companies to execute this process in a continuous loop: as new data assets are introduced that need to be protected, as data recovery priorities change, and as opportunities for improvement are identified.

Service level protection-tailored to your needs
IBM recognizes that different companies have different recovery goals, and that different applications or services within each company have different recovery requirements. Service level protection is not a "one size fits all" solution. That's why IBM has developed a modular solution approach-three distinct but integrated offerings to address a wide range of business continuity requirements, from traditional backup and restore technologies that can restore within hours or days, to next-generation data protection solutions that can restore access to any data within minutes, to high-availability technologies that can restore within compressed timeframes. The integrated nature of these offerings allows customers to build on their successes as they evolve their service level protection strategies:

• Storage infrastructure - Storage infrastructure service level protection focuses on the recovery of physical servers and storage devices. This simple and straightforward approach relies on traditional backup and restore technologies as well as bare machine recovery to deliver recovery timeframes that range from days to hours.

• Application aware storage - Application aware storage service level protection builds on the capabilities of storage infrastructure, adding the concept of application awareness to the solution. By leveraging application discovery and block-level continuous data protection technologies, companies can link service level agreements (SLAs) to key applications, better aligning IT to the needs of the business. This offering can deliver faster recovery timeframes for strategic applications, with technologies that can backup and recover applications without having to interrupt their availability.

• High-availability storage - High-availability storage service level protection addresses the classes of mission-critical applications that demand high availability. This solution builds on the capabilities of storage infrastructure and application aware storage, adding technologies for replication and virtualization. Depending on the application environment, this offering can deliver recovery within minutes, helping companies maintain service levels for applications that truly run the business.

Turn to IBM for solutions that help you plan for inevitable business disruptions-and help reduce the impact of those disruptions on your critical business processes. IBM provides comprehensive, integrated solutions that deliver rapid time to value, with the flexibility to change when business requirements change.