Business continuity may be defined as "the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at pre-defined acceptable levels following a disruptive incident", and business continuity planning is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to enable ongoing operations before and during execution of disaster recovery. Business continuity is the intended outcome of proper execution of both business continuity planning and disaster recovery.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting or even ecological economics where it includes social costs.
A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems.
IT disaster recovery (also, simply disaster recovery (DR)) is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle. DR employs policies, tools, and procedures with a focus on IT systems supporting critical business functions. This involves keeping all essential aspects of a business functioning despite significant disruptive events; it can therefore be considered a subset of business continuity (BC). DR assumes that the primary site is not immediately recoverable and restores data and services to a secondary site.
Data loss is an error condition in information systems in which information is destroyed by failures or neglect in storage, transmission, or processing. Information systems implement backup and disaster recovery equipment and processes to prevent data loss or restore lost data. Data loss can also occur if the physical medium containing the data is lost or stolen.
A remote, online, or managed backup service, sometimes marketed as cloud backup or backup-as-a-service, is a service that provides users with a system for the backup, storage, and recovery of computer files. Online backup providers are companies that provide this type of service to end users. Such backup services are considered a form of cloud computing.
Given organizations' increasing dependency on information technology (IT) to run their operations, business continuity planning covers the entire organization, while disaster recovery focuses on IT.
Unitrends Inc., a Kaseya company, is an American company specializing in backup and business continuity.
High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system that aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period.
A computer operator is a role in IT which oversees the running of computer systems, ensuring that the machines, and computers are running properly. The job of a computer operator as defined by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics is to "monitor and control ... and respond to ... enter commands ... set controls on computer and peripheral devices. This Excludes Data Entry."
In computing and telecommunications, downtime is a period when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an unplanned event, or because of routine maintenance.
Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization emulates the hardware environment of its host architecture, allowing multiple OSes to run unmodified and in isolation. At its origins, the software that controlled virtualization was called a "control program", but the terms "hypervisor" or "virtual machine monitor" became preferred over time.
Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which data, said to be on "the cloud", is stored remotely in logical pools and is accessible to users over a network, typically the Internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers, and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a cloud computing provider. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment secured, protected, and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.
"Cloud computing is a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to ISO.
In information technology, real-time recovery (RTR) is the ability to recover a piece of IT infrastructure such as a server from an infrastructure failure or human-induced error in a time frame that has minimal impact on business operations. Real-time recovery focuses on the most appropriate technology for restores, thus reducing the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to minutes, Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) to within 15 minutes ago, and minimizing Test Recovery Objectives (TRO), which is the ability to test and validate that backups have occurred correctly without impacting production systems.
Continuous availability is an approach to computer system and application design that protects users against downtime, whatever the cause and ensures that users remain connected to their documents, data files and business applications. Continuous availability describes the information technology methods to ensure business continuity.
Granular configuration automation (GCA) is a specialized area in the field of configuration management which focuses on visibility and control of an IT environment's configuration and bill-of-material at the most granular level. This framework focuses on improving the stability of IT environments by analyzing granular information. It responds to the requirement to determine a threat level of an environment risk, and to allow IT organizations to focus on those risks with the highest impact on performance. Granular configuration automation combines two major trends in configuration management: the move to collect detailed and comprehensive environment information and the growing utilization of automation tools.
Managed private cloud refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serves a single client organization (tenant), and is managed by a third party. The third-party provider is responsible for providing the hardware for the server and also for preliminary maintenance. This is in contrast to multitenancy, where multiple client organizations share a single server, or an on-premises deployment, where the client organization hosts its software instance.
Disk-based backup refers to technology that allows one to back up large amounts of data to a disk storage unit. It is often supplemented by tape drives for data archival or replication to another facility for disaster recovery. Backup-to-disk is a popular in enterprise use for both technical and business reasons. Storage devices have gotten faster access time and higher storage capacity. There are different forms of disks used for back up, standard mechanical disks and solid state disks.
Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future.
