Each year hundreds of data centers worldwide will experience significant service interruptions.  These businesses will be threatened by problems caused by user errors, viruses, hardware failures and natural disasters. Business Continuity is now at the forefront of corporate IT strategies and has gained visibility throughout management up to the CEO level.

Elements of a successful business continuity strategy include: application availability planning, preventive measures such as monitoring and platform redundancy, data protection, disaster recovery strategy and effective personnel plans.

The use of virtualization can improve all aspects of business continuity:
        · Faster, less expensive disaster recovery due to hardware independence between primary and failover servers
        · Elimination of scheduled hardware downtime and dramatic reduction in scheduled software downtime

        · Single point of control for managing all virtual machines and monitoring the host machines

        · Encapsulation of complete machines into files for capture and recovery

        · Simplified & repeatable automated processes