The information in your database is probably vital to the continued operations of your organization. Indeed your organization may well be unable to function if you either lose significant amounts of data or if the database is unavailable for a sustained period of time, such as if the database crashes. This critical need for business continuity is driving  organizations to focus on building computing infrastructure that will ensure persistent information availability across the enterprise.

There are various options to protect your data in the event of disaster. The solution that is right for you depends upon your attitude to risk, how important your database is to you, how long it would take you to recreate it, how much downtime you can allow, how much data loss is acceptable and how much money are you prepared to pay. What is essential is that you at least consider the issues, come to a conclusion and then implement and test your business continuity strategies. Despite all the warnings and disaster stories in the press we still get people phoning us up with corrupt/broken databases and no backup.

What is achieving high database business continuity anyway? The main thing – we need to understand what is our goal. What exactly we are trying to accomplish? Based on the industry’s many publications, best practices and expert opinions, we can define the following set of goals: