Why There Is No Business Continuity - Business Continuity: Network Load Balancing

A similar concept is at work in a new generation of Ethernet switches from Woven Systems, which are plugged into a mutually supporting fabric of switches. This system allows load to be automatically balanced, and, in the event of a failure, the other switches on the network automatically kick in to make sure there is no disruption in service.

When you think about it, this is the way all enterprise-class technology products should work. If they did, the underlying infrastructure would be intelligent enough to provide an embedded business continuity capability. With that in place, it would also be a lot easier to wrap people’s minds around the whole sustainability issue, which dominates much of the discussion taking place in the boardroom today.

The core element of creating a business sustainability strategy is to break down processes into a set of modular components that can be easily replicated in the event of some type of disruption. But if the underlying IT infrastructure is too fragile or expensive to support a sustainability strategy, the issue becomes moot.

The good news about all the fuss over sustainability is that it forces companies to take a hard look at their IT infrastructure. A lot of business executives don’t want to have a conversation that basically ends up with them having to authorize additional IT budget allocations. As a result, they wind up shorting the IT budget in terms of what is really required to sustain the business. In effect, this means most companies are betting that a major business disruption isn’t going to happen, rather than putting appropriate plans in place beforehand.

The best answer to this conundrum would be for every product to simply plug into a fabric in which every device automatically supports every other system, but it will probably be a few years before that happens. This means IT people need to have real conversations about the costs of sustainability, given the fact that the business basically runs on the back of the IT infrastructure.

Of course, insisting that technology vendors provide distributed load-balancing capabilities as a core feature, rather than as an expensive option, would be a major step in the right direction.