|
Metrics for Organizations with no Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan
 According to Janco Associates, an International Disaster
Recovery - Business Continuity consultancy the most common form of enterprise
wide disaster is related to power outages.
Janco has found that in disaster recovery and business continuity cases
it has reviewed the following is true:
-
Over one third companies take more than a day to recover from a major
power outage caused by events like hurricanes and extensive
disasters.
-
Over eleven percent of companies take more than a week to recover from
these events.
-
The typical time to reconfigure a network that has not been planned for
can take up to 72 hours - if the resources are available.
-
Data that is lost (not backup up electronically) can take weeks to
re-enter if there is paper trail and if there is none the data can be lost
forever.
-
Over 85 percent of companies that experience a computer disaster and do
not have a Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity Plan go out of business
within 18 months. -
more info
Disaster Recovery Planning Scope
All Disaster Recovery Planning and Business
Continuity Planning need to encompass how employees will communicate, where they
will go and how they will keep doing their jobs. The details can vary greatly,
depending on the size and scope of a company and the way it does business. For
some businesses, issues such as supply chain logistics are most crucial and are
the focus on the plan. For others, information technology may play a more
pivotal role, and the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan may have
more of a focus on systems recovery.
But the critical point is that neither element can be
ignored, and physical, IT and human resources plans cannot be developed in
isolation from each other. At its heart, BC/DR is about constant communication.
Business leaders and IT leaders should work together to determine what kind of
plan is necessary and which systems and business units are most crucial to the
company. Together, they should decide which people are responsible for declaring
a disruptive event and mitigating its effects. Most importantly, the plan should
establish a process for locating and communicating with employees after such an
event. In a catastrophic event (Hurricane Katrina being a recent example), the
plan will also need to take into account that many of those employees will have
more pressing concerns than getting back to work. -
more info
Disaster Recovery Metric Defined
A proposed
overall metric for Disaster Recovery is Total Time to Disaster Recovery (TTDR),
which is the time it takes to backup the data, deduplication of the data,
replication of the data at remote DR site, and then finally recovery of the data
so it is in an operational state. This metric is all-inclusive as it takes into
consideration every aspect of the backup and recovery environment into account
when performing a true disaster recovery.
Recovery
and data replication are the much more important ones issues that need to be
considered. It is great to backup data fast, but if it takes three times as long
to recover it, try to explain that to your CIO when a major application goes out
and he is standing over your shoulder waiting for the data to be
recovered.
TTDR
includes:
-
Backing
up the data
-
De-duplicating the data, and
-
Replicating the data to the remote disaster recovery
site
-
Setting
the data and the applications to an operational
state -
more info
Backup For Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Now Easier
 Quantum
Corp. a global specialist in backup, recovery and archive, announced two new
product releases designed to help end users solve the challenges of data backup
and recovery across distributed environments by improving local data protection
and disaster recovery (DR) while streamlining management and reducing costs. The
latest addition of disk backup solutions with deduplication and replication, the
appliance is optimized for remote and branch office environments that are part
of a distributed enterprise. The other software product release provides new
centralized, multi-tier management and reporting capabilities for unifying
backup resources, including disk and tape.
-
more info
Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Basics
The basics
of a Disaster
Recovery Business Continuity Plan are defined in the Janco Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity Template. They are:
-
Develop the contingency planning policy
statement. A formal department or agency policy provides the
authority and guidance necessary to develop an effective contingency
plan.
-
Conduct the business impact analysis
(BIA). The BIA helps to identify and prioritize critical IT
systems and components.
-
Identify preventive controls. Measures
taken to reduce the effects of system disruptions can increase system
availability and reduce contingency life cycle costs.
-
Develop recovery strategies. Thorough
recovery strategies ensure that the system may be recovered quickly and
effectively following a disruption.
-
Develop an IT contingency plan. The
contingency plan should contain detailed guidance and procedures for restoring
a damaged system.
-
Plan testing, training and exercises.
Testing the plan identifies planning gaps, whereas training prepares recovery
personnel for plan activation; both activities improve plan effectiveness and
overall agency preparedness.
-
Plan
maintenance. The plan should be a living document that is updated regularly to
remain current with system enhancements. -
more info
New Devices Make Backup Easier to Implement
Backup and recovery
while complex may be easier as media vendors release new advanced products.
While many external drives now come with a physical push-button backup option, a
new genre of backup devices is emerging one-touch USB flash drives that combine
the convenience of small size with relatively sophisticated backup applications
for data protection.
The latest
to arrive is the SanDisk Ultra Backup USB Flash Drive,
which combines push-button backups with SanDisk's U3 smart-drive technology that
allows a user to store Windows PC user preferences, profiles and settings as
well as download and launch a limited number of applications from the flash
drive. -
more info
Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Templates Addresses Mid-sized Requirement
Mid-sized businesses have long
struggled to protect their IT systems. Many firms are inadequately protected and
mistakenly think that a disaster is rare and will not happen to them anytime
soon. There is a lot of confusion
and misunderstanding regarding what disaster recovery encompasses and how to
implement it effectively. The Janco
Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Temple provides CIO and CFO with
tools that address minor and major disaster scenarios. This template also
clarifies what true disaster recovery means and how backup and high availability
are not true DR solutions. Janco studies the newest technology trends, such as
virtualization and storage replication, which make powerful DR solutions
attainable and affordable even for mid-sized businesses.
-
more info
What is critical in creating a DRP BCP that works?
Good disaster recovery planning is about
identifying those processes and resources that are truly critical, developing
realistic recovery objectives for them and then developing a plan that can
achieve those objectives as simply and cost-effectively as possible.
The reality
is that a sophisticated DR plan
that is too complex or expensive to properly maintain and test is worse than
a plan that only does the minimum because it gives a false sense of
security.
CIOs must make the right
decisions in order to develop an effective, executable plan that allows their
organization to create a process which will help them to recover critical
enterprise functions after a disaster. -
more info
Backup Service Providers May Not Be Enough
Your data is only as safe as its most recent backup. But what happens when you have worked on
your laptop with enterprise critical data and it is lost or damaged. You data is only as redundant as the
integrity of the data that you have stored on your servers, but in this case you
may have a compliance issue that you have not addressed. For companies that
service customers in the cloud, if they cannot offer 99.9999% uptime and
absolutely ensure data backup and restoration, they might as well not be in
business.
There are a few issues at hand here. Not only must
the backup provider
ensure that the data is accurately and securely backed up whereby every
packet and byte is accounted for, but you must also ensure that when the time
comes, the data is "clean" enough to be plugged back into the system without a
hiccup. It's the hiccup that companies need to avoid which is why they look for
ways to backup their data to begin with, however they aren't always as proactive
as the results they were expecting. -
more info
CIOs see Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Budgets Slashed
Many CIOs
have seen their disaster
recovery budget for 2009 slashed and are wondering how they can recover when
a disaster occurs. CIOs are now
looking for solution that that will not cost any money upfront. CIOs feel they
can get money to recover if they have solution in place. CIOs cannot sit idly by
while they roll out critical services without the safety net of Disaster Recovery / Business
Continuity Plan in place - that is like skiing without a helmet or driving a
car with no seat belt. For most, there is a very good chance that nothing bad
will happen, but if something does go wrong, the consequences can be so severe
that the overall risk is unacceptable. -
more info
|
