From business continuity to design of critical infrastructures: ensuring the proper resilience level to datacentres

Since a few years, companies that runs business critical applications are increasing their focus on their support infrastructures. Indeed, it is clearly useless to pursue higher systems reliability, when the infrastructure is vulnerable. Aim of this paper is to explore the value of business continuity within the scope of the design of resilient system. The publication of the fifth revision of ANSI/TIA/EIA 942 standard provides operation managers and risk managers with a framework to plan and design resilient infrastructures. It will be shown how to use the aforementioned standard to analyse the gap between the current and the desired resilience level of a system, and suggest the proper steps to reach it, accordingly to the business continuity requirements. This approach was adopted on the case of the power system infrastructure of a primary Italian Application Service Provider, granting 24/7 mission critical services to its customers.