How do I establish recovery priority for my applications?

If it's at the IT level, it comes from a data perspective. When you start moving up a little bit into the business...

side, people start looking at the applications because they don't really know where the data is. If we talk today about virtualization, you lose where that data is, so you're looking at the application, but it's really essentially the same idea. The recovery priority for your applications is based on the same criteria as the actual value of the data they use. It's really: Which business processes make use of those applications and what is their criticality?

Recovery priority information Restoring data: Increase your efficiency Move your backups to a SAN Business continuity for mission critical applications

Something that's very often overlooked is the backup application itself. It's probably one of the most critical applications that you have, although it doesn't show up as an application most of the time. It becomes an infrastructure component. You need to restore your backup server and your backup application before you can start restoring data.

When we look at a business, there are always core functions and support functions. Backups are definitely a support function. In the banking industry, from a data replication and criticality of the data standpoint, it's definitely the financial data that would be important and the most critical. However, when we're looking at an application priority, we need to start looking at support functions and core functions.

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