In This Issue
- Budgets Cuts Impact Disaster Preparedness
- Budget Looms - Focus on Cutting IT Spending
- Security Policies and Procedures
Budget Cuts Impact Disaster Preparedness
The needs for available data and regulatory compliance requirements have not slowed down...
Disaster recovery and business continuity plans are not up to date
Most businesses never suffer a catastrophic data loss. For those that do, whether caused by hardware failure, natural disaster, fire/flood, employee malice…..it can be devastating. More than 50% of businesses suffering a catastrophic loss of data never recover.
In the last two years, internal IT resources become stretched. This has lead to companies looking for ways to cut costs in all areas in disaster recovery and business continuity. Disaster recovery plans need to be viewed as ongoing programs -- not projects that can be put on the shelf for a year.
In addition, companies scaled back IT recovery sites. This has lead to a recovery installation which does not match the current production environment. Critical applications can then no longer be recovered in a timely manner.
The IT Productivity Center - a division of Janco Associates, Inc. has conducted a study of 253 recovery efforts and identified why DRP BCP plans fail.
The most common issue and occurring in 62% of all recovery plans are errors in the plan itself. This is often due to the plan not being kept up to date (47%) and the unavailability or inaccurate passwords (34%).
Additional reasons for failures are:
- Insufficient backup power - 22%
- Communications not in place - 18%
- Personnel not trained - 17%
- System priorities not identified - 14%
- Recovery not documented - 13%
- Event not identified - 12%
Budget Looms - Focus on Cutting IT Spending
CIOs and IT Managers are reviewing all areas to cut growing IT infrastructure costs
CIOs and IT managers are challenged to maintain high quality service in a 24x7 environment in an economy that is troubled at best. In interviews with a number of top IT executives, Janco has identified five areas where costs are increasing beyond acceptable levels and proposed solutions to help manage those costs. The areas where cost is increasing and recommended solutions are:
Mandated compliance requirement management - Numerous laws and regulatory mandates focus on corporate governance and accountability around sensitive. The cost of this continues to explode.
Recommended solutions:
- Implement a strong data governance policies
- Use software and hardware tools to clean up business records
- Implement an efficient records management policy
- Centralize security and records management
Continual storage expansion - Analysts estimate that the volume of business e-mail is growing by 25–30 percent each year, and currently, the world’s information base will double in size every 11 hours.
Recommended solutions:
- Consolidate databases to make administration simpler and more cost effective
- Compress data to minimize the amount of storage space that is required.
- Archive data to lower cost media to free up high-value storage space and keep databases running smoothly.
Increased administrative cost due to system complexity - Janco has found that 75 percent of all companies have three or more enterprise database management system (DBMS) products in their environment. Metrics show that many DBAs devote up to 80 percent of their time to routine systems maintenance.
Recommended solutions:
- Simplify management processes and eliminate unnecessary administrative tasks by automating basic database administration functions.
- Outsource routine activities to give in-house DBAs more time for new projects.
Quick fixes that result in Server Sprawl - Small cheap servers may limit IT spending in the short term, but often is not the best nor most cost effective long-term solution.
Recommended solutions:
- Virtualize
- Consolidate severs were possible
- Replace older power and cooling consuming servers with “green” servers
Reliability and scalability requirements increase overhead - Most enterprise information is contained within IT systems, it is absolutely critical that those systems be available whenever your employees or your customers need them. With 24x7 availability requirements, systems have to scale as workloads increase. Reliability improvements and scaling by adding staff and servers can result in the wrong infrastructure and raise costs.
Recommended solutions:
- Use clustered configurations
- Consolidate and virtualize
- Centralize administrative functions
- Implement strong security and business continuity policies
Read on Order Cost Control Kit...
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