1. Read text on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, including Figure 6.6.

Power protection and distribution Air conditioning Intelligent and cable environmental management controls Infrastructure dependencies Asset Enclosure and management rack space and management tracking KVM ports and remote access FIGURE 6.6 Components of a. data center management system.Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Another area associated with data centers is business continuity and disaster recovery. "Business continuity" describes the processes and steps a healthcare organization puts in place to ensure that it's essential business functions will continue during and after a disaster (Barnes, 2004), One of the most important areas of business continuity planning is disaster recovery planning, which comprises the planning. process, policy, and procedures undertaken to prevent the interruption of mission-critical IT services and to reestablish ful IT functioning as swiftly and smoothly as possible. As EHRs and other HIS technologies become more commonplace in healthcare environments, it is critical that the risk of a system outage or data center disaster be mitigated. Many health organizations today have not fully developed their business continuity plan (BCP) or disaster recovery plan (DRP); these organizations should consider performing a BCP or DRP assessment to determine the level of risk that is acceptable. In preparing a BCP. the organization should first identify and prioritize the criticality of the various HIS components and then determine the appropriate recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each HIS in the event of a disaster or unplanned system outage. RTO refers to the total time (in minutes, hours, or days) during which a server or service can remain unavailable before it is restored to full functionality. while RPO refers to the total time (in minutes, hours, or days) for which data might be lost. Keeping BCP and DRP at the same level of priority as other projects within HIS is often challenging for healthcare organizations to accomplish, but it is critical to do so. The increasing dependence on HIS and technology throughout health care necessitates investment of time and effort to establish and maintain these protective capabilities. An examination of important DRP concepts will demonstrate the various steps that organizations can take to reduce this risk, Redundancy is one of the simplest concepts that should be implemented at all levels of DRP. Where possible, having two instances of server, storage, or network system components-such as central processing units (CPUS), HDDs, NICs, storage host bus adaptor (HBA) cards, system controllers, and cabling-will enable the hardware system to support the HIS and remain operational should a failure occur that is restricted to any one of the components.At the next level, servers, storage. and network systems themselves should be clustered, load balanced, or mirrored such that if the primary system fails, the secondary system will continue to provide service. Clustering is typically used with applications and databases, while load balancing is used with web servers, file servers, and various network devices. Mirroring is used to replicate and maintain synchronous copies of data between two or more SANS. Moving to the highest level of redundancy, data centers themselves should be redundant. To accomplish this in today's environment. each primary data center should be associated with a corresponding secondary or backup data center. Secondary data centers can be configured as cold sites, tepid sites, warm sites, or hot sites, such that they can provide different levels of service in the event that the primary site is unavailable. " Cold sites are facilities that have hardware and software available for use, but are shared with other organizations and contain no data from the primary data center. Should a disaster occur, the cold site systems would need to be configured and the backup data restored to the cold site location. This is the least costly DRP option and has no distance limitation between data centers, but it can take several days to bring an organization's critical systems back online. " Tepid sites are similar to cold sites, but have the data from the organization's critical systems copied over using basic SAN replication. This is the third most costly DRP option, has a distance limitation of 1,000 miles or less, and takes only two to three hours to bring an organization's critical systems back online. Warm sites improve on the tepid site capability, with the difference being that all systems and data from the primary site are copied over, although noncritical systems will operate in a degraded mode. This is a costly DRP option, has the same distance limitation (1,000 miles) as tepid sites, and requires only one hour or less to bring an organization's systems back online. " Hot sites can provide rapid, automated and full system and data recovery in less than a minute, but are the most expensive option. They have a distance limitation of either 200 miles or a data transfer round-trip time of 10 milliseconds.Backup systems are another key technology that healthcare organizations can leverage to ensure HIS and data availability. Tape-based backup systems, such as digital linear tape (DTL) and linear tape-open (LTO) models, use magnetic tape, tape drive systems, and stand- alone or centralized backup application software to make backup copies of computer data on tape. Tape backup systems have been used in data centers for many years but suffer from limitations such as unacceptable slow backup and restore transfer times, limited capacity to address the exponential storage growth found in modern HIS, the risk of losing tapes that are stored at remote locations, and the inability to store data indefinitely. Additionally, tape backup systems lack support for advanced features such as encryption-at-rest capabilities. Disk-based backup systems address many of the shortcomings of tape backups by backing up system and application data to disk. These systems have the benefits of being able to reduce the amount of data that must be backed up by as much as 90 percent through a process called data deduplication. Data deduplication eliminates the need to back up redundant or already backed-up data. As a result, disk-based backup systems have higher backup storage capacities and faster backup and restore times. They more easily move and store data to disparate locations using network and cloud-based technologies and are designed to use advanced security features and both encryption-at-rest and encryption-in-transit. Virtual tape libraries (VTLs) are backup systems that use disk-based arrays to emulate tape libraries. With these systems, the storage medium can be switched from tapes to disks while continuing to use the existing tape backup software. VTLs lack the advanced features of disk-based backup systems