Over my past few posts, we looked at highlights from the following roadmap for Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery deployment that I see emerging based on shifts in IT architecture thinking and advancements in technology: 1. Identify critical apps and establish RTO/RPO objectives 2. Re-centralize branch infrastructure to primary datacentre 3. Virtualize /consolidate your server environment 4. Build high-availability into your IT environment locally 5. Establish a secondary datacentre site (internal or third party) 6. Deploy automated failover technology (e.g., scripting) 7. Optimize the pipe linking primary and secondary datacentres On IT Budgets … since what you are able to do vis-à-vis the business continuity roadmap will ultimately be shaped by budget, let me offer some comments on the shift I'm seeing in how organizations look at certain aspects of their IT budget, including Business Continuity. Historically when an IT shop undertakes cost-cutting measures, the organization rarely gives IT those saved dollars for other initiatives–they are usually cost savings that most organizations want to send right to the bottom line. But we appear to have come to a unique turn in the road. For the first time I can remember, business leaders are starting to acknowledge that they can't just keep taking it away from IT and are now saying things like, "We'll give some back, but only where we see business value." And, for the first time, businesses are saying that High Availability and Business Continuity make sense and can provide that value: "I no longer have to cope with system downtime or disruptions to our business." The caveat that goes with this concession by financial management, however, goes something like, "We're ok with the costs as long as they are squeezed down to the absolute bare minimum," which gives IT all the more reason to undertake the steps we've talked about in my past few blogs–consolidation, data de-dupe, building-out high availability locally, and perhaps most important of all, having clearly defined RTO/RPO objectives on an application-by-application basis so that spending can be limited to the core applications. It appears that we may be at a 'tipping point' where there are more 'smart' IT budgets being created as executives are starting to say, "I'll give something back to the IT budget to do this [i.e., BC/DR] that for the last 20 years I've just been taking from them." This may not have happened in IT for decades. Feel free to e-mail me if you have thoughts on BC/DR you'd like to share, or to find out how Compugen can help you achieve your RTO/RPO objectives cost-effectively.