True or false: most companies have business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place. The answer? False. Most people would argue that having a business continuity and disaster recovery plan is important, but many companies have only cobbled together barely enough redundancy for tenuous peace of mind. In fact, a 2012 Information Week survey reports that only 38 percent of respondents have business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place and test them regularly.

Why would an organization put their business at risk when disruption can occur from so many sources—from service attacks, to earthquakes, to wildfires to severe weather? The answer is simple: it’s costly and complicated.

Avoiding the high price of business disruption
Resiliency can indeed bring complexity and be very costly, but business disruption can be even more costly. We’ve all seen the damage companies have suffered when equipment failure leads to network outages. It can be disastrous and for many huge businesses recently, it has.

What these companies saved by not investing in an adequate business continuity and disaster recovery strategy has cost them severely in credibility, brand image and customer confidence. Essential, proactive measures can make all the difference when it comes to preventing a disruption.

First and most obvious, your network can’t have a single point of failure. Redundancy is at the heart of every sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan. But, when it comes to cost-effectiveness, that redundancy must be smart redundancy. It’s not a matter of supporting your operation by utilizing an empty facility, completely provisioned for use in case of disaster, in a town 40 miles away. What’s needed is a flexible solution that makes full use of all of the physical and logical resources, all the time. Data centers are among the most critical components of enterprise business. And smart data centers are key to maximizing resiliency.

Using open standards to connect two or more data centers together will create a backbone for services to run among them. A large business might have hundreds or thousands of apps and services operating simultaneously. Interconnected data centers can do a lot more than ensure resiliency, they can load-shift to handle demand peaks. More importantly, they can help scale infrastructure easily and affordably as a business grows.

Interconnected locations, open standards and scalability are key
The ability to scale interconnections is critical, as is management without undue complexity. An open standards solution is best equipped to deliver on these requirements, by offering flexible scaling without a lot of rip-and-replace. A single operating system further simplifies and streamlines the processes as business grows. With it comes the ability to add more people, locations and services by using a solution that scales elegantly in step with business needs.

A sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan can be affordable, manageable and most importantly, achievable. Building a network that can grow will enable businesses to maintain high-availability in normal, adverse and extreme conditions allowing them to reliably deliver the performance their customers expect.