Summary of Bundle Offering

The United States set a record with 12 separate billion-dollar weather/climate disasters in 2011, with an aggregate damage total of approximately $52 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That is just continuing the trend of the past 30 years.

These incidents have prompted many organizations to reconsider the human element during a crisis or major news event and evaluate how they communicate with employees, suppliers, investors and customers. Emergency and mass notification systems are designed to help organizations communicate to stakeholders during an incident or disruption. However, in response to the high occurrence of prominent disasters in recent years, the marketplace has been flooded with products to address emergency and mass notification needs. The need to diligently evaluate vendors is critical to ensure that services will meet an organization's specific requirements.

To help you mitigate impact to your core processes, your plan should address three key phases:

• Business Continuity Response - these are the steps you take immediately to sustain your core processes, your primary business priorities
• Disaster Recovery Response - these are the steps you take to extend your core processes indefinitely and address your secondary priorities
• Restoration Planning Response - these are the steps you take to restore your business to its pre
  -incident level

As a result, the cost and complexity of using traditional disaster recovery products to address data replication needs in highly virtualized environments forces many organizations to forego disaster recovery altogether.

And although not possible to avoid all risks, business continuity management (BCM) can minimise the disruption to a business to a great extend, protecting its share price, stakeholder relations, and reputation, among others.

With that said, BCM is a critical strategic function that cannot be neglected by any organisation whatsoever.

Still, managers often neglect charting a strategic course for their company's future survival, which in itself poses a huge risk, seeing that there are many internal and external events that could impact on a company's overall performance, such as:

• the death of the CEO, owner or key staff member
• fire, flood or earthquake damage - this could hamper operations while organisations repair damages or settle insurance claims
• an interruption in the supply chain
• the loss of a major client
• production line failure or breakdown
• failure to stay abreast of technological innovation
• product failure or contaminationinterruption in telecommunications or power supply

These requirements build a basis for using tape for data protection in the mid‐market, in part because of the high likelihood that organizations already use some form of tape in their IT set‐ups. Tape continues to be the preferred home for nearly 70 percent of the world's data. Using tape for DR automatically builds on existing infrastructure and practices, and provides cost‐effective long‐term storage that addresses DR and legal compliance.

RIM's problems raise some important issues for all business continuity managers:

• Successful tests do not guarantee that business continuity strategies will work.
• Holistic business continuity plans need to consider the failure of failover systems and require that strategies are in place to deal with such a situation.
• High availability systems are not a substitute for conventional business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. The latter provide the belts and braces required for total system assurance.

According to RIM the downtime was the result of the failure of a core network switch and then the failure of business continuity processes which were meant to kick-in.

RIM explained the situation in a service message posted on Facebook:

"The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIMÂ’s infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated, and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we will continue to keep you informed."

Issues include, failing over to the backup site is a manual process and most systems do not include a mechanism to fail back to the primary site. Getting the primary site back online is a labor- and network-intensive process. Another is that most email systems do not utilize compression, which results in additional network bandwidth consumption.

BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were unable to use email, BBM and various other services due to a major fault. To inform users of the incident, Blackberry chose to utilize social media, posted a message stating:

"Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues. We're investigating, and we apologise for any inconvenience."

This basic message resulted in a stream of abuse and negative comments, with 2,500+ messages being posted on Facebook alone.

The theme of many of the complaining comments were:

• Questions about when services would be restored;
• Questions about whether Blackberry would provide compensation for the downtime;
• Questions about why Blackberry customer services employees were not responding to comments posted by users;
• Generally abusive comments by people using the incident as a means of venting existing frustrations with Blackberry.

The incident shows that companies need to think very carefully about whether unrestricted social media is an appropriate medium for customer service information. If organizations decide to go down this route, it is critical that messages are not just posted and left; they must be monitored and customer care employees must proactively engage with customer responses.

• How are business departments designed and deployed throughout the company globally?

  

• How are critical functions dispersed through the various locations?

An efficiently run business is always looking at its model and adapting to change -not only within the four walls of the company, but also global changes. As we operate in a flat world, businesses need to consider factors that 20 years ago did not exist to the level they do today. Economic and social changes occurring around the globe on a regular basis force businesses to look at all factors from a comprehensive cost perspective. Business models need to adapt when it becomes disadvantageous being in a specific country. Issues such as unstable governments, civil unrest, devalued currency or inflation that cause the cost point to increase and push the business out of a market, (for example, due to increased salaries and cost of living, or industries that are more favorable drawing on your employee pool). There are many more but the point is the dynamics of change outside of a company can greatly influence the inner workings of that company. And where the company goes, so does business continuity and disaster recovery.

Business continuity and disaster recovery programs must align and adapt with business models no matter how fluid they become, rather than react to those changes once they are in place.

This has been the focus of much of the discussion of continuity planning: how to make data redundant for safety. Typically, this entails a combination of approaches collectively described as defense in depth. Typically, some attention is paid to making data redundant at the transactional level—to protect against the accidental deletion or corruption of a file or database transaction and to enable recovery to a point in time just prior to the event itself. A number of technologies are available for this purpose, and the term Continuous Data Protection (CDP) has become an umbrella concept.