High availability, redundancy, and disaster recovery

Where Blue Prism is running business critical automated processes, the consequence of a production environment failure preventing the successful running of these processes can be serious.

There are three main aspects to consider when configuring Blue Prism for redundancy or resilience:

• Operational control – How the platform is configured operationally to execute work can impact the behavior when it responds to a failover or recovers from an outage. This can relate to a number of areas such as process design, demand management, frequency of schedules, management of process exceptions etc.
• Availability of target systems – The availability of the business systems which are accessed by the automated processes will impact the ability of the platform to operate successfully.
• Underlying architecture – The hardware and core services on which Blue Prism relies must be configured to be appropriately resilient.

This section provides information relating to providing resilience at the architecture level.

For detailed information on load balancing, the deployment options, and the implications for the Blue Prism application operation, see the Load Balancing Reference Guide.

Technical considerations for high availability, redundancy, and disaster recovery

From a technical perspective High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) can be achieved using concepts such as:

• Component redundancy – having n+1 components in your Blue Prism environment.
• Using load balancers across multiple application servers.
• Spreading Blue Prism infrastructure across multiple, geographically separate sites.
• SQL database HA concepts such as:
  • Clustering
  • Always On Availability Groups
  • Mirroring
  • Log shipping
  • Multi-site replication
• Keeping offsite backups
• Taking advantage of Blue Prism resource pools
• Resilient process design
• Monitoring components vigilantly.