Introduction
Insuring that there is business continuity in an organization of Information Technology infrastructure is a very crucial requirement in the current business environment. Most of the recovery solutions that were used in the past have proved to be complex, costly, and in most cases did not meet the objectives of the recovery process.
In order to ensure the most reliable and fasted recovery, such solutions need fully duplications of production infrastructure as well as its associated costs so as to avoid failures that are mostly caused by hardware dependencies (Craig, 2008). The recovery process that were used in the past also used complex manual process that proved to be slow as well as remained prone to errors.
Following this situation, organizations that still use these traditional methods find it challenging to offer sufficient disaster recovery in their privileged systems hence limited business continuity.
Perspectives
The core requirements for business continuity and disaster recovery include;
i. Rapid Recovery; Most of the traditional methods are slow as they make use of manual steps.
ii. Reliable Recovery: The recovery method used should be able to eliminate most if not all of the traditional causes of failed recovery that include failures following hardware dependencies.
iii. Affordable Recovery: the recovery method should make it possible for reliable and rapid disaster recovery without the need of an idle, duplicate datacenter. Virtual machines can be recovered on any kind of hardware, even those that have been repurposed or retired from production.
Challenges
While most organizations have appreciated the need to have business continuity, they still face a lot of challenges when it comes to delivering effective protection for their important Information technology applications. The challenges include;
i. High costs; solutions to business continuity have continuously become more expensive as the availability requirements keep on increasing. Most of the solutions demand for significant investments in additional software, hardware, and services. Disaster recovery plans in most cases need duplicating datacenter infrastructure. Such requirements increase the business continuity cost and lead to an underutilized server’s proliferation.
ii. High Complexity; Continuous solutions that were used by organizations in the past are complex to manage, implement, and execute (SEC, 2003). Recovery infrastructure management, up-to-date maintenance of manual and complex recovery procedures, and effectively testing plans contribute to significant complexity.
iii. Unreliable Solutions; Testing complex organizations continuity solutions has proved to be challenging now that testing in most cases requires personnel resources and significant equipment. The complexity of such solutions makes then challenging to maintain.

Solutions
Possible solutions to the above mentioned challenges include;
i. Virtualization offers true hardware independence therefore eliminating the need to have software reinstalled or perform a bare-mental recovery process. Modern recovery methods enable organizations to automate the recovery process execution so as to further accelerate recovery.
When it comes to storage interface and network failures, the recovery solutions platforms should be in a position to support storage and network interfaces. Redundant storage and networks interface cards may be shared through having multiple virtual machines on a single server, reducing the implementing redundancy costs
ii. The recovery process should ensure that the recovery plans are executed consistently as designed and offer testing automation that are not disruptive, simplifying recovery plans testing (GAO, 2007). Virtualization has also been observed to make it easier to come up with redundant servers that do not need additional software purchases through allowing for the virtual machines provisioning to the underutilized servers that are already in existence.
iii. Virtualization has proved to the solution for reducing the server infrastructure cost for both recovery and production and for server consolidation. Also, virtualization allows for the utilization of recovery hardware with no effect on the disaster recovery as well as without the need for reconfiguration.

Conclusion
Organizations that make use of the modernized continuity and disaster recovery solutions are in a position to address some of these challenges now that they ensure effective disaster recovery for both virtualized and physical servers. Such approaches can recover physical servers to recovery targets for virtual machines in the case of a physical to virtual recovery.

References
Craig, S. (2008). “Section 3¬2—Business Continuity Planning.” Handbook of Information Security Management
GAO (2007).”Financial Market Preparedness: Significant Progress Has Been Made, but Pandemic Planning and Other Challenges Remain.” United States Government Accountability Office
SEC (2003).”Policy Statement: Business Continuity Planning for Trading Markets.”Securities and Exchange Commission Release No. 34¬48545? File No. S7¬17¬03.