We all know that SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest revenue generating product in company history. Currently 80% of enterprises have bought it; Microsoft has more than 68,000 SharePoint customers today. At Synesis IT, our Collaboration service line is growing at the same pace. However, we are not planning for business continuity and high availability for our clients during the planning and sales stages and continue to ignore this aspect during development and deployment of the solutions. Because of this failure, SharePoint is not considered a Tier1 application in most companies.
SharePoint poses general challenges, such as:
· Spread of environments
· Inconsistent development
· Different governance models
· Poor operations management
All these factors give SharePoint Tier 1 status. Unfortunately, whether SharePoint is used as the platform for a company’s Internet presence or as a departmental collaboration solution, most organizations still consider it a Tier 2 application even though collaboration is set to become even more important and integral to their business. The maturing of cloud, mobility and social networking bring new benefits and challenges.
First we need to change our own perception of the value of this downtime. Think about high availability and business continuity technologies to protect against outages. We can incorporate load balance technology today to build our solution for high availability, but forget to consider disaster recovery. Before we put a SharePoint environment into production, very often we forget to test it against a number of simulated situations, such as the following:
· Failure of hardware components
· Data corruption
· Loss of a server
· Network outage
· Loss of data center
The penalty for failure is to have to re-seed the secondary Web Front End (WFE) (re-starting from scratch) — a time-consuming process that leaves the enterprise temporarily vulnerable to data loss and, potentially, very unhappy customers. We need to remind our customers during the beginning of our engagement that a business continuity plan is as valuable as any other part of the SharePoint farm design.
Strict business continuity management constraints have low RTO and RPO. RTO refers to Recovery Time Objective, or effectively the mean time between failure and restoration of service on one or more sites. RPO refers to Recovery Point Objective, or the amount of data (measured by time) that can be acceptably lost (for example, 5 minutes). If we fail to do a business impact analysis for SharePoint within our engagement model, we will fail to provide good value of SharePoint service. Our customers’ organizations will be impacted by the lack of a suitable business continuity management plan, and associated service level agreements (SLAs) for the service. If you do not know the business importance of a service, or the costs associated with outage and data loss, you cannot effectively define SLAs for that service. These SLAs will not only define the agreements for recovery objectives and service availability, they will often help determine what backup, recovery, and availability solutions are required to meet them. Moreover, they are likely to feed into other key design aspects for a SharePoint deployment, ranging from storage planning to governance guidance for the creation and deployment of customizations.
I hope no developer will use SharePoint without first understanding the important people and business considerations to every SharePoint-based solution. Let us all work together to stay alert while making SharePoint a Tier1 application. We have to change our way of thinking and realize that SharePoint should be considered as a service, but this can only happen if it first it becomes Tier 1. It is imperative that our clients understand the value of having SharePoint as Tier 1 for their Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, and everybody at any organizations should strive to reach this goal.
