Introduction
Virtualization’s biggest driver is big savings: slashing expenditures on servers, licenses, management, and energy. Another major benefit is the increased ease of disaster recovery and business continuity (DR/BC) in virtualized environments.
Note that disaster recovery and business continuity are closely aligned but not identical. We define disaster recovery as the process of restoring lost data, applications and systems following a profound data loss event, such as a natural disaster, a deliberate data breach or employee negligence. Business continuity takes DR a step further. BC’s goal is not only to recover the computing environment but also to recover them swiftly and with zero data loss. This is where recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) enter the picture, with IT assigning differing RPO and RTO strategies according to application priority.