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Doing "more with less" may sound good at the all-hands pep rally, but let's get real. That chant is best left to election taglines. We're in the throes of a business downturn, and net reductions or slashed increases in IT budgets mean sacrifice. It's time to adjust to the current reality and do the best with you have. Understanding how to effectively, efficiently do less with less during difficult times is where smart decision-making begins. From the standpoint of business continuity, how can you hold onto the ground you've gained and be sure your strategy remains viable with fewer dollars and fewer resources, but no shortage of demands? The Burton Group's Jack Santos and Richard Jones will lead a discussion about strategies, choices and tactics for doing less with less, while enhancing your career as an innovator and team player.

Few IT managers have the luxury of creating their data centers from scratch. They inherit what those who came before them thought would satisfy the needs of clients who are no longer there, to support business initiatives that have lost a sense of urgency. At the same time, new applications with pressing SLAs must be supported, protected against attack, and available without interruptions 24/7. While you are at it, make sure you have a bullet-proof business continuance plan defined, implemented, tested and retested.

IT infrastructures are dynamic, ever-changing, living things. As such, they perform best when healthy and resilient. Downtime can be … well, deadly in any number of ways. Yankee Group’s Zeus Kerravala, explores best practices for designing, managing, and maintaining IT infrastructures for long, productive lives, and for fast recovery when the unthinkable happens.

While not every IT-supported business function or process has the same uptime requirements, one thing is certain: The value of application availability is increasing throughout the enterprise at a time when budgets are decreasing. Business continuity requires resiliency and superior availability throughout the IT infrastructure, including virtual environments. Striking the proper balance of uptime necessity, skill sets, budget parameters, and strategic IT initiatives – such as SaaS or virtualization – is not simply challenging, it’s essential. Burton Group’s Richard Jones will delve into the analytics of defining availability SLAs, industry solutions offered to achieve desired levels of uptime, and their relative strengths, costs, and trade-offs against a range of ROI criteria.

No business continuity webinar series can be complete without an examination of disaster recovery. A DR plan is an essential component of a business continuity strategy, not a substitute for one. And redundant IT services at a location geographically distant from the primary data center are only part of a comprehensive DR plan (or, maybe better called a business resumption plan?). If taken seriously and done right, recovery planning is hard work that never really ends. Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group senior vice president, concludes our 2008 Taming the Hydra Series with an examination of the many facets of comprehensive DR planning, as well as a look at how the IT community at large tackles this increasingly important aspect of Business Continuity.

Laura DiDio, Research Fellow, Yankee Group: As follow-on to our April Virtualization presentation, this Webinar will use real world scenarios designed to assist companies in determining the TCO and ROI of their virtualization deployments. It will provide detailed cost analysis of virtualization components and illustrate the manpower and actual dollar costs associated with a true fault tolerant virtualized environment that features 99.999% continuous availability compared to a virtualized server deployment that features 99.99% high availability.

Richard Jones, Vice President and Service Director, Burton Group: Selecting the correct platform is often about figuring out the correct balance between sometimes conflicting requirements more than it is about choosing the server platform that meets a simple set of needs. This webinar will explore the many variables and selection criteria standing between you and an informed platform decision.

Laura DiDio, Research Fellow, Yankee Group Yankee Group survey data indicates that an overwhelming majority of organizations from SMBs to the largest enterprises have already deployed or have plans to virtualize their data centers. But all virtualization solutions are not created equal. This Webinar discusses the deployment trends impacting the virtualization market in the 2008-2010 timeframe. It will also provide an overview of the pros and cons of Virtualization and highlight the significant differences and impact on TCO and ROI between servers that deliver high availability (99.99% uptime) compared with servers like the Stratus ftServer family that deliver continuous availability (99.999% or 99.9999% availability).

Richard Jones, Vice President and Service Director, Burton Group, discusses how to assess the value of different data to keep your business running when the unforeseen happens. He explores the relative merits and combinations of technologies for continuous data protection, replication, backup/restore, and archiving.

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