Can you use the cloud for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity? - 
In December
2010 Google launched Message Continuity, a new cloud-based disaster recovery
and business continuity service for Microsoft Exchange. A year later,
Google has announced the end of that service, leaving many organizations with
the task of finding an alternative Microsoft Exchange business continuity
service.
While the vendor said that existing contracts will continue to be serviced
until their renewal date, for some early adopters of this service will only have
a few weeks, or even days, to find an alternative solution.
This raises a warning flag about the wisdom of relying on the public cloud
companies for any services which may be critical to your day-to-day activities;
or for business continuity.
The cloud brings many new solutions for disaster recovery and business
continuity: but buyer beware has never been more crucial. Service level
agreements only apply if your supplier is in business; and there is certainly no
requirement for suppliers to provide any support or service once a contract
expires.
After this termination of service can you trust Google or any other vendor to
host a mission-critical service?
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Core disaster recovery planning questions - Whether your business is a one-man operation or it employs a thousand people,
the starting point is the same: identify the processes critical to your success.
To do this, you should first define what critical means in your business. Rank
each process according to that definition, and then ask how long can your
business survive without it, who performs it, and what IT resources support it.
Questions you can ask:
- Can you simply not survive without this process? This should be your
primary priority. Your business continuity plan must protect all primary
priorities when a disaster strikes.
- Can you survive only a day or two without it? This should be a secondary
priority. Your business continuity plan should address all secondary
priorities after primary priorities are handled.
- Can you survive a week or more without it? Add it to your list of low
priorities.
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Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption - 
BS 25999 defines the maximum tolerable period of disruption
(MTPD) as :the duration after which an organization's viability will be
irreparably damaged if delivery of a particular product or service cannot be
resumed". It advises companies to "
assess over time the impacts
if the
activity is disrupted" and "
establish the MTPD of each activity". It instructs
us to identify the latest time by which an activity must be resumed, establish
the minimum level to which resumption must be achieved, and set the time within
which normal activity levels must be restored. It says companies should
"
identify any inter-dependent activities, assets, supporting infrastructure or
resources that also have to be maintained"
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Disaster Preparedness equals risk, resilience and effective disaster recovery planning - Most people who are involved in emergency management are aware of the four
primary phases of emergency management: prevention/mitigation, preparedness,
response and recovery.
Recovery includes short-term measures taken to restore essential functions
and systems, as well as longer-term activities intended to facilitate a return
to pre-emergency conditions, or ideally to improve conditions through mitigation
measures.
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Importance of data recovery for mid-sized companies - 
Identifying the right tools for data recovery in the disaster
recovery and business continuity processes is extremely important to the success
and continuity of middle‐sized organizations. These tools need to be integrated
without requiring an expensive and disruptive overhaul of existing IT
infrastructure, and without adding to or demanding more of IT staff.
One key to this is to build on existing data storage and protection
equipment. Tape is the best option when expanding on existing processes, because
tape is a medium that is affordable.
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