Executive Summary
Information Technology: Strategic Issues in 2001 and Beyond

By Jon William Toigo

Older methods and techniques of contingency planning are increasingly challenged both by technological innovation and mounting infrastructure obsolescence.  It can be safely assumed that, in 2001 and beyond, numerous crises will occur as a result of rapid technological change.  At the same time, business dependency on technology will continue to grow.

Surveys and projections from many sources indicate that, despite a burgeoning economic slowdown, IT budgets will not shrink in 2001, but will actually increase.  Within IT, budgets will be increasingly targeted at: 1) salary and benefits packages designed to retain IT talent in the face of an increasingly tight labor market, and 2) projects creating applications and infrastructure enabling organizations to do more with less – that is, projects that harness technology to make fewer staff more productive and enable the more efficient exploitation of markets.  More than ever before, the deployment of strategic technology is viewed as the key to corporate profitability and success.

These general trends translate to increased dependency of business upon automation:  from the storage device, server and LAN to the WAN and the Internet.  It is important to note that this increased dependency comes at a time when these core technologies are themselves in a state of flux.

Data Storage

In the realm of data storage:  a fixed limit to the growth of data storage capacity, imposed by superparamagnetism, will be reached within the next couple of years.  Given current materials and science, all vendors agree that disk areal density (the number of bits of data that can be packed onto a disk platter) will top out at 150GB per square inch.

Ramifications of this superparamagnetic limit are many.  From the contingency planner’s viewpoint, one important consequence is the increasing use of storage virtualization.  Virtualization refers to the amalgamation of many physical storage devices (as well as partitions from large storage arrays) into a fewer number of virtual volumes. 

Virtualization has as many risks as benefits.  One potential problem has to do with data recovery.  Restoring backup data from tape to virtualized volumes in a post disaster environment is a problematic undertaking at best.  The virtualization method used to create a volume acts as a filter in data restoration that can slow the process to a crawl.  (Imagine a five Terabyte data restoration operation requiring over 100 hours, rather than 24 hours in a non-virtualized environment.  That "chill up the spine" is reality kicking in!)

Servers

Today, storage is increasingly the center of the IT universe and servers are becoming the satellites orbiting the storage infrastructure.  Servers are themselves becoming increasingly complex.  Intel’s new VI architecture, for example, is another technology improvement that will be coming on line in the next couple of years.  VI architecture servers are actually clustered servers within a server.  That is, the main CPU now shares (or oversees) program execution tasks with many smaller single-purpose CPUs.  While celebrated as the triumph of deconstructionist thinking in server design, VI architecture may also be viewed as a multiplier of the potential points of failure within the server.

Application Architectures

Application servers – a poorly defined category of software products offered by numerous vendors to enable the integration of traditional client/server and legacy systems with new web and wireless technology "front ends" – are adding to the complexity of client/server recovery environments.  Presumably, application servers, which are not subject to any rigorously defined standards, enable businesses to "short cut" their efforts to exploit the medium of the Internet and World Wide Web.  However, n-tier application architectures that include application servers and related middleware technologies also represent an unparalleled challenge to traditional contingency planning techniques.

Networks

The advent of network-based applications also poses new challenges for business continuity.  Contingency planners must address a dizzying array of threats and exposures, ranging from the overburdened and often unreliable services of both local exchange carriers and interexchange network carriers, to the expense and complexity of broadband service provisioning, to the vulnerability of critical networks (and the Internet) to increasingly savvy, motivated and well-equipped hackers.  Just keeping up with the latest viruses, denial-of-service strategies, broken encryption schemes, and exploitable weaknesses of operating systems and application software products is a full time job!  The challenges are growing even more profound as new networking technologies, such as Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM), are brought on line that promise to dramatically improve network capacity while, at the same time, create "black holes" that few current network management systems can effectively monitor or manage.

The Bottom Line

In the face of rapidly changing technology, planners can no longer be asked to protect systems and networks "after the fact."  They will need to become involved at the earliest stages of application development and systems implementation to ensure that the capabilities for cost-effective platform recovery are embedded wit in the designs of systems and networks.  The challenges are clear.  But within them is also contained the opportunity for contingency planning to become an integral part of effective technology stewardship.

About the Author
Jon William Toigo, independent consultant and author, has supported both employers and clients with disaster recovery planning assistance over the past 15 years.  He is the author of ten books.  His latest book, Disaster Recovery Planning 2nd Edition (Prentice Hall PTR: 2000), is already a best seller in the field. Toigo can be contacted at (727) 736-5367 or by email at jtoigo@intnet.net.  For more information visit www.drplanning.org. Copyright 2000, Jon William Toigo, All rights reserved.