Let's continue our look at highlights from the roadmap for Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery deployment that I see emerging based on shifts in IT architecture thinking and advancements in technology: 1-3 . See initial post on RTO/RPO, re-centralizing branch infrastructure and virtualization 4. See my last post on building high-availability 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 5. On Establishing a Secondary Datacentre … most datacentres were built in Y2K and even though they are very old now, very few organizations are building new ones; and given the number of third-party options now available, it makes less and less sense to, at least in terms of the cost in dollars, staff and expertise. However, if only a small amount of failover infrastructure is required (e.g., SMB organizations or larger organizations that are highly virtualized), some organizations are opting to use an existing remote branch as a secondary datacentre location. The facility already exists and spare IT staff and equipment may also be available following recentralization and consolidation of the branch's infrastructure (i.e., roadmap step 2). In situations requiring more extensive secondary site infrastructure and thus classic datacentre support that is too expensive to build, including space, power, HVAC, Internet bandwidth, physical security and available 24x7 monitoring, organizations are increasingly exploring third-party datacentre service provider options. These primarily include "co-location"–your equipment installed in a third-party datacentre–and "managed hosting"–a turnkey outsourced secondary site (i.e., their equipment, their facility, their 24x7 monitoring and management). Under the moniker of "cloud services", the managed hosting model continues to evolve. For example, some hosting providers are starting to offer a multi-tenant environment to keep costs down in order to maintain an aggressive price point. Global players Google and Microsoft offer multi-tenant cloud services, but the most noteworthy solution so far appears to be the Amazon EC2 offering, whereby Amazon is 'renting' excess capacity within its own datacentre. This might be ideal for organizations looking for a third-party secondary datacentre solution for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes that is cost-effective, quick and easy to set up, and that scales up or down quickly as needs change. The IT team at Compugen is currently looking at various internal and outsourced secondary datacentre options so we don't leave all our eggs in one basket–our in-house primary datacentre. In my next post on the new BC/DR roadmap, I'll offer some thoughts on optimizing the pipe between primary and secondary datacentres to keep networking costs from going through the roof. 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 cost-effectively navigate the new Business Continuity roadmap. This story previously appeared in Compugen's Tuesday Technology Report.