It is the second anniversary of the data centre outage that grounded thousands of British Airways customers at a cost to the company of over £50 million. In this article Caroline Seymour looks at the issue of IT resilience in the airline sector.

Accurate recovery point objectives are essential for the recovery and restoration of systems in the time expected, but they are often neglected within business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Robert S. Emmel explains what RPOs are and how they can be calculated using various factors.

Last year, some of the largest and most well-known brands across the globe, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, experienced interruptions to their services due to network outages. Whether these organizations experienced downtime due to internal network errors or full blown [Distributed] Denial of Service [D]DoS attacks, the costs to their reputations and, is some cases, their revenues, proved significant.

Sandi Hamilton looks at the importance of considering the human factor when planning and managing high availability environments for critical applications such as SQL Server. She considers inherent organizational issues which result in continuity gaps and discusses the communication and documentation practices that can reduce failures.

The worldwide move to remote work in the past year has brought business continuity challenges as well as advantages. Backup management is one such challenge and in this article, four technology experts from Commvault answer key questions in this area.

As organizations continue to adapt to new cultures of home and hybrid working, networks are being rapidly evolved. Alan Stewart-Brown looks at the resilience threats and opportunities that this is bringing.

Jason Collier looks at the difficulties that SMBs often experience when developing IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans and claims that switching to a hyperconverged approach will solve many of the issues.

In this detailed article, Bob Draper FBCI provides guidance on the effective implementation and maintenance of resilience and disaster recovery capability of IT systems, and is applicable, by scaling, to all sizes of business organization. This paper is intended for readers who are familiar with business continuity management (BCM) and disaster recovery (DR) and the processes to develop and manage related policies, standards and procedures.

Steve Blow explains that while businesses must remain consistently focussed on digital transformation in order to not fall to the back of the pack, digital transformation efforts could be futile if businesses don’t address and improve their IT resilience.

Organizations can focus on some key mitigation priorities to secure the network’s edge more effectively. Kent Woodruff explains…

Taking disaster recovery operations to the cloud is a good first step in the journey towards becoming a ‘cloud-first’ organization says Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, highlighting three potential routes to achieve cloud DR.

Network misconfigurations not only can cause downtime they can be serious security threats. Avivi Siman-Tov discusses the misconfiguration errors that plague businesses and what strategies they can use to prevent them.

On July 14th 2015 Microsoft is scheduled to end support for Windows Server 2003. This means no more updates or patches from Microsoft, which can result in a less stable and less secure infrastructure for organizations that have not yet transitioned to Windows Server 2012 R2. A surprisingly large number – analysts estimate as much as 60 percent – of organizations have not yet created a migration plan. According to Logicalis US, which has been assisting clients in the assessment, design, planning, migration and deployment activities related to this transition, there are five significant reasons why doing nothing can spell disaster.

Businesses often overlook the usefulness of service management tools that they already have at their fingertips as a way to streamline and effectively manage internal risk processes. Dean Coleman looks at some practical steps that businesses can take to utilise these for effective IT risk management.

Andrew Stuart offers some IT-focussed experience-based business continuity tips.

Any business – whether big or small – can be damaged as a result of even a few hours of downtime. Lost revenue equates to loss of customers, not to mention permanent loss of data. Managed service providers (MSPs) are no exception to this rule and have a responsibility to put a strong back-up policy in place to mitigate any detrimental impact on the business and its customers from downtime.

Downtime to the broadband connection is now one of the major threats facing today’s organizations, so why are many businesses not considering resilience when purchasing broadband or looking at how broadband failure fits into the disaster recovery plan? Mike van Bunnens, managing director, Comms365, explores the issue.

Agentless backup is one of the latest buzzwords in disaster recovery and business continuity, but how much do we really know about it or what it means for organizations using it?

While the hardware and software costs for disaster recovery are well understood many organizations do not fully realize that, in order to be assured of successfully executing the plan in the event of an outage or disaster, a comprehensive IT DR program must first be in place. An organization can have all the right IT DR hardware and software, but without a properly managed program, its efforts will fail.

Businesses often struggle on with legacy server rooms due to budget constraints and fear of upgrade risks. In this article Mark Allingham challenges BC managers to face up to this problem.