Business continuity is one of the most important business challenges that an enterprise IT organization must address. Corporate governance requirements mandate transparency in processes and impose regulatory concerns, imposing great accountability on IT organizations to deliver systems that are consistent, resilient, and able to quickly recover from outages. The IT organization also must deliver infrastructures that maintain continuous availability of applications. The underlying infrastructures must quickly recover from disasters and be scalable to accommodate dynamic growth on an as-needed basis. These challenges have made corporate data centers crucial IT resources for strategic and competitive advantage. Because a single outage can be very costly, IT managers are making significant investments to help ensure that the network, computing, and storage infrastructures in their data centers have maximum resiliency built into their design.
Robust management practices are also required to help ensure that IT resources can be managed proactively to both detect and address problems in a preemptive fashion. Best-practices architectures allow IT managers to deploy environments that are simpler to manage and have lower total cost of ownership (TCO). These architectures help ensure that underlying infrastructure resources can be optimized, shared, and virtualized across multiple user groups and applications. A consolidated infrastructure by nature makes it easier for IT managers to implement consistent business continuance and disaster recovery policies to deliver agreed-to service-level agreements (SLAs) across multiple user communities. Business continuance practices must thus take a comprehensive approach, including network redundancy and availability, computing resources, data availability, disaster recovery, and application performance.
SERVICE OVERVIEW
The Cisco® Data Center Networking (DCN) Business Continuance Assessment analyzes the customer's various IT services to identify any specific risks and related dependencies that could affect the IT organization's ability to support business application requirements and objectives. The assessment documents the initial findings and outlines remediation recommendations to improve resiliency in the data center infrastructure. The assessment provides a more long-term disaster recovery blueprint and presents the next steps in this evolution.
LEADING CISCO BUSINESS CONTINUITY EXPERTISE
Cisco data center consultants and engineers have direct experience in all phases of the planning, design, implementation, operation, and optimization of the crucial data center infrastructure of large enterprises. They hold several industry certifications and have a broad range of experience in helping run network operations for many global Fortune 500 companies. The assessment covers topics such as data center infrastructure, data center security, operations and organization, and IT services.
Table 1 summarizes the topics and potential benefits of the Cisco DCN Business Services Continuance Assessment.
Table 1. Assessment Topics and Benefits
Cisco DCN Business Services Continuance Assessment Topics
Potential Benefits
Data center infrastructure
• Data center facilities
• LAN, metropolitan-area network (MAN), and WAN access
• Data center network design
• Inter-data center connectivity
• Site selection, load balancing, and content caching
• Networked storage design
• Storage area network (SAN), FICON, network attached storage (NAS), Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI), and IP SAN
• SAN and NAS intelligent services
• Storage virtualization and SANTap
• Server-to-server virtualization
• Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS)
• Intelligent network services
• VPN remote access
• Identify risks and potential resiliency bottlenecks in the data center infrastructure.
• Recommend remediation to achieve the following:
• Improve the availability of data center resources.
• Increase the availability of the network infrastructure.
• Increase the availability of the storage infrastructure.
• Increase the general availability of essential business applications.
• Improve the resiliency of the data center network infrastructure.
• Improve remote access.
Data center security
• Worm protection, denial-of-service (DoS) attack prevention, and intrusion detection and prevention
• Anomaly detection and event correlation
• User access to data
• Internal and external network security
• SAN and NAS security
• Improve system and data protection.
• Increase data integrity.
• Proactively enhance data center security.
Operations and organization
• Application and infrastructure monitoring processes
• Capacity management
• Change management
• Release management (software and Cisco IOS® Software upgrades)
• Reduce the need for incident and problem resolution.
• Proactively manage infrastructure resources.
• Avoid outages caused by unmanaged changes.
• Minimize risks during upgrades.
• Centralize configuration management.
• Identify technical staff gaps.
IT services
• Essential business process and applications
• Essential IT services, such as the following:
• Web services
• Extensible Markup Language (XML) services
• Portals
• Data center centralized application
• File services and NAS
• IP services (Domain Name System [DNS], Network Time Protocol [NTP], Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol [DHCP], RADIUS, RADIUS Data Proxy [RDP], and Citrix services)
• Understand business risk and requirements for essential IT services.
• Improve IT services inventory.
• Improve understanding of the infrastructure and IT service dependencies.
ASSESSMENT DELIVERY PROCESS
The Cisco DCN Business Continuance Assessment is delivered in a structured process that consists of the following phases:
1. High-level requirements collection-Cisco sends the customer a questionnaire to collect data to understand the business process requirements and goals of the data center.
2. Business continuance workshops-Cisco conducts several workshops and interviews with the customer.
• Business processes interviews and discussions-This meeting allows the customer to communicate the crucial business processes and goals.
– Who is responsible for the business continuity program and what is the organization structure?
– What are the essential business processes?
– What are the service level goals for these business processes ?
• Business application interviews and discussions-This meeting helps the customer understand the association between crucial business processes and business applications.
– What is the association of business processes to business applications and what are the dependencies?
– Who is responsible for these business applications and what is the organization structure?
– What are the service level goals for these business applications?
• IT organization and IT services detailed investigation-This meeting allows the customer to further detail the IT organization and how the IT services map to the business applications. Here the customer defines which IT services will continue to the following phases.
– What is the association of business applications to IT services and what are the dependencies?
– Who is responsible for these IT services and what is the organization structure?
– What are the service level goals for these IT services?
• Infrastructure detailed inventory and analysis-By interviewing the manager responsible for IT services, the assets that comprise the IT services are identified. The customer is asked to provide all required information (hardware, software, designs, configuration reports, disaster recovery plans, etc.) that is concerned with IT service.
– What is the association of IT services to the data center infrastructure and what are the dependencies?
– Who is responsible for these infrastructure components?
– What are the service level goals for these infrastructure components?
3. Analysis-Cisco analyzes risks and develops a disaster recovery plan.
• Risk analysis-The possible risks associated with the assets that make up the IT service are identified. Each IT service and its assets are analyzed to understand weaknesses related to high availability, redundancy, human error, processes, security risks, and exposure to man-made and natural disasters.
• IT services impact analysis (ITSIA)-The ITSIA looks at the exposed risks identified in the risk analysis and their potential effects on the IT service. Here these effects are correlated with the expected disaster recovery objectives set out by the customer in the previous phases. If no disaster recovery objective has been specified, then the effects are recorded and discussed with the customer and reported in the disaster recovery plan.
• Disaster recovery plan-This plan makes remediation recommendations and suggestions to help the customer develop a disaster recovery strategy and vision. The customer then has the option of engaging Cisco to implement the remediation plan.
4. Completion of the report-The Cisco DCN Business Continuance Assessment report has the following structure:
• I. Executive Summary
• II. Current Status of IT Services and IT Organization
• III. Specific Customer Requirements and Identified Risks
• IV. Assessment Findings and IT Services Impact Analysis
• V. New Disaster Recovery Plan and DCN Architecture Proposal
• VI. Conclusions
5. Review and final presentation-The Cisco DCN Business Continuance Assessment report is reviewed with the customer's IT team and then presented to the customer's management.
AVAILABILITY
The Cisco DCN Business Continuance Assessment is available in all theatres.
SUMMARY
The Cisco DCN Business Continuance Assessment use Cisco Advanced Services expertise in data center architecture to identify and recommend remediation activities that support the customer's service-level, availability, reliability, and disaster recovery capabilities.
ORDERING
The Cisco DCN Business Continuance Assessment is a custom service offering and is ordered through a statement of work and purchase order.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For more information about the Cisco DCN Business Continuance Assessment or Cisco Advanced Services, contact your Cisco Systems® representative.
