It’s a big, diverse IT world out there. In any given data center, you can walk down the aisles and see racks of servers or storage from literally dozens of different companies, all doing their jobs—but not necessarily always in exact harmony. The coordination of proprietary, open-source and open-standards software that can clash is often a sore point for IT managers—and those are often found within the same data center environment.
This all affects business continuity big time, because all those diverse components have to work together in order for a system to recover after being hit by an outage.
The constant parade of new hardware and software that necessarily comes into a data center as applications, business requirements, bring-your-own-device policies and service-level agreements is updated. It all makes for a lot of moving parts that can be extremely difficult for IT managers to integrate in a business continuity plan.
Through it all, however, the system must continue to be available; most are needed to run 24/7 and still be protected from potential disasters at all times. Because of this change, it’s crucial for organizations to have sound preventive maintenance plans and on-site experts as their data center evolves. As organizations upgrade to new equipment and centralize data centers, they may not realize that it’s equally important to have the necessary power, cooling infrastructure and disaster recovery tools in place to ensure IT availability through worst-case events.