Enhancing the Disaster Recovery Plan Through Virtualization

Currently, organizations are increasingly aware of the need to protect their computer infrastructure to maintain continuity of operations. This process involves a number of different concerns including: managing natural disasters, equipment failure, and security breaches, poor data management, inadequate design, and complex/impractical design. The purpose of this article is to delineate how virtualization of hosts and cloud computing can be used to address the concerns resulting in improved computer infrastructure that can easily be restored following a natural disaster and which features fault tolerant hosts/components, isolates applications security attacks, is simpler in design, and is easier to manage. Further, because this technology has been out for a number of years and its capabilities have matured an attempt has been made to describe those capabilities as well as document successful applications. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3625-5.ch016