IT Operations Blog

Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Up To Date?

Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Up To Date?
2 minute read
Ann Irza, Sushan Bhattacharjee

In this unpredictable world, disaster can strike at any time. Businesses must protect themselves against natural disasters, power outages, cyberattacks and other events that could jeopardize their day-to-day operations.

Disruptions can lead to lost revenue, reputational damage, and unhappy customers. The longer the recovery time, the greater the impact will be. According to ITIC, the hourly cost of downtime ranges from $1 million or higher for 40 percent of enterprises, exclusive of the costs associated with potential legal fees, fines, or civil or criminal penalties.*

To ensure continuity and protect their customers, enterprises must have a recovery plan that protects their assets, data, and applications in an increasingly dynamic and diverse IT environment. Those modern infrastructures now include software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based applications with a microservices architecture deployed on the cloud and in containers alongside monolithic applications housed on legacy servers.

Given the fast pace of development and numerous updates to the IT environment, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain accurate information about each business service’s deployment architecture; the different technology stacks that support them; and the dependencies between services and IT resources. Maintaining an accurate, up-to-date snapshot of these details is critical to ensure that the right failover mechanisms are in place.

How do you know what to protect?

BMC Helix Discovery’s SaaS-based, agentless discovery and dependency modeling solution helps IT teams discover detailed information about all of their assets and applications. Within minutes, business continuity managers can obtain an up-to-date list of hardware and software versions and patches across cloud-native or on-premises environments.

How does it work?

Disaster recovery is challenging when continuity managers cannot obtain an up-to-date landscape of their IT infrastructure after disaster strikes. Understanding the impacted business services and technical dependencies and their design helps IT teams prioritize recovery, which results in faster response time and minimal disruption.

BMC Helix Discovery helps enterprises discover assets and their dependencies across on-premises and cloud environments. Using a lightweight outpost that runs within the customer’s data center or public cloud, combined with IP ranges and credentials, it scans the environment to securely identify all assets across the entire infrastructure.

In addition to discovering dependencies between IT services, BMC Helix Discovery highlights communications between IT resources. Its intelligent pattern language identifies activity between software, hardware clusters, and their dependencies. This helps enterprises define rules that automatically identify the entities that constitute a business service.

When disaster strikes or a failure occurs, BMC Helix Discovery allows enterprises to quickly understand which services have been impacted and prioritize restoration of critical business services to manage service level agreements (SLAs) and minimize the downtime of those key elements.

Ensure business continuity

By properly monitoring and managing their assets and applications, IT organizations can:

  • Maintain higher levels of business continuity
  • Increase response times
  • Minimize disruption
  • Protect customer data

BMC Helix Discovery helps IT organizations easily track asset and application deployment across any complex infrastructure. By maintaining an up-to-date backup and recovery environment, enterprises can avoid catastrophic failure; ensure reliability; and prevent service downtime to protect their business, brand, and customers.

Learn more at bmc.com/discovery.

*Information Technology Intelligence Consulting, “ITIC 2020 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report,” April 2020

IT Portfolio Discovery: A Modern Solution

From public cloud and containers to microservices application delivery, IT infrastructure has never been more complex. IT teams need a way to gain an end-to-end view of every environment as well as complete visibility into business services performance.


These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

Ann Irza

Ann Irza is a Principal Solution Marketing Manager at BMC with over 20 years’ experience working with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Throughout her career she has worked in marketing, sales, engineering, and program management. Ann enjoys working with sales and delivery teams to develop solutions that will help end users achieve their technical and business objectives.

About the author

Sushan Bhattacharjee

Sushan Bhattacharjee is a Product Manager at BMC Software with over 15 years of experience working in IT automation spanning across DevOps, Cloud, and Data Center automation and Security. At BMC, along with his colleagues, he is building products to help enterprises transform into an autonomous digital enterprise. He is a certified Product Manager (CPM®, AIPMM), PMC Level IV (Pragmatic Institute) and holds an MS degree in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Apart from his quest to create valuable products, he enjoys exploring new places and food.