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Can you use the cloud for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?

February 2nd, 2012
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

January 20th, 2012
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

January 7th, 2012
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"

Defining Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption...
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Disaster Preparedness equals risk, resilience and effective disaster recovery planning

December 14th, 2011
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

November 5th, 2011
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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What is ISO 27031:2011

October 27th, 2011
ISO 27031:2011 Information and communications technology (ICT) continuity management, developed originally by the British Standards Institution (BSI), was accepted as an ISO standard in 2011 and represents a management systems-based implementation of an IT disaster recovery program. It has six key principles:

Protecting the ICT environment from incidents, failures and disruptions;

Detecting incidents at the earliest possible time;

Reacting to incidents as efficiently as possible;

Recovering by identifying and implementing appropriate recovery strategies;

Operating in disaster recovery mode.

Returning to normal operations.

While ISO 27031 is intended for use in the larger context of a business continuity program, organizations have successfully implemented this standard and then later grew into business continuity.

Structured as a management systems-based standard, ISO 27031 has two main components: the management system and the process. The management system is intended to ensure that an organization has a documented process to execute ICT continuity management. It utilizes the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle consistent with ISO and other management system based standards. The process details the necessary components to provide the recovery capability. While the management system described in ISO 27031 can be established solely for IT disaster recovery, there are elements of the process that assume the existence of an overall business continuity program. As you can see below, ICT requirements are established by business continuity requirements typically determined during a business impact analysis.

The process of developing, maintaining, and improving an ICT capability are defined as five high level components:

Understanding the ICT requirements for business continuity with the purpose of determining the ICT continuity services needed to support the business continuity requirements. The process requires understanding the components of critical services in production, their current continuity capability and the gap between current capabilities and business continuity requirements. The analysis should also focus on actions that can be taken to improve the resiliency of the production environment;

Determining ICT continuity strategies with the purpose of developing both an overall ICT continuity management strategy and strategies for each critical ICT service that closes gaps identified during the previous phase;

Developing and implementing ICT strategies with the purpose of implementing the chosen strategies, including establishing the necessary organizational structure, plans and procedures;

Exercising and testing with the purpose of ensuring that the strategies and plans work as intended;

Maintenance, review and improvement with the purpose of ensuring that ICT continuity strategy remains current and appropriate.

For those familiar with BS 25999-2:2007, the business continuity management standard, the structure above is consistent with sections four through six of that standard.

Given the similarities to BS 25999, ISO 27031 is the logical choice for implementing a disaster recovery capability in organizations that either utilize BS 25999 for business continuity or have other management systems-based programs. It also provides solid guidance for organizations that have no business continuity or other structure in place to serve as a basis for disaster recovery development. Establishing a management system as part of an ISO 27031 implementation will provide the necessary governance and provide a platform for the development of a more comprehensive business continuity program.
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Mirrored DR architecture

October 16th, 2011
The most common DR architecture for mission-critical, multi-tier applications consists of a mirrored site with geographically distributed clusters of front-end application servers (the presentation tier), calling functions executed on another local cluster of business logic servers (logic tier), which access a local database (data tier). Users access the application via a global load balancer or application delivery controller (ADC) that seamlessly routes client requests - whether these are Web-based or client-server application protocols like CIFS and MAPI - to the "most available" system. The load balancers must themselves be geographically distributed and redundant to ensure no single points of failure should the entire data center go offline.

Data consistency is achieved by mirroring all back-end databases at the SAN level. Here, the IT architect has two choices: synchronous or asynchronous SAN replication. The former provides virtually instantaneous recovery, with perfect consistency, but with the glaring drawback of a severe distance limitation between mirrors to minimize latency, since transactions can't be committed on the primary database until they are written to disk and acknowledged by the secondary.
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National Preparedness Goal released

October 12th, 2011
The Department of Homeland Security has announced the release of the first edition of the National Preparedness Goal. This is the first deliverable required under Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 8 : National Preparedness.

The goal sets the vision for nationwide preparedness and identifies the core capabilities and targets necessary to achieve preparedness across five mission areas laid out under PPD 8: prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery.

The goal also sets out future steps that will be taken to comply with PPD 8. These include:

A National Preparedness System
A series of National Frameworks and Federal Interagency Operational Plans
A National Preparedness Report
A Campaign to Build and Sustain Preparedness.

The latter will provide an integrating structure for new and existing community-based, nonprofit, and private sector preparedness programs, research and development activities, and preparedness assistance.

Read the National Preparedness Goal (PDF)
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Social network integrated in disaster recovery template

October 1st, 2011
During the disaster recovery and business continuity processes this year in many companies proved the worth of having social networks integrated in their disaster recovery and business continuity plans. However, Janco has found only about 25% of businesses have added social media like Facebook or Twitter to their disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

Depending on the scope of the disaster -- a national horror such as September 11 or an 8.9 earthquake -- the use of social media can ease some of the communication burden for government and businesses. Australian government agencies extensively used social media during the country's recent regional flooding. In the United Kingdom, the Resilient Nation project recommends that government set forth initiatives to leverage citizens' ready access to social networks.

Janco's disaster recovery business continuity template take this into consideration.

The Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is provided in Word and PDF format. It is a complete DRP and can be used in whole or in part to establish defined responsibilities, actions and procedures to recover the computer, communication and network environment in the event of an unexpected and unscheduled interruption.
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Budgeting for business continuity

September 16th, 2011
Budget overseers are hard pressed to come up with a business case for spending money on a capability that may never need to be used unless there are significant legal or regulatory mandates for creating one. That explains why fewer than 50 percent of organizations have continuity plans, and of those that do, less than 50 percent actually test their plans - which is tantamount to having no plan at all.

For such a strategy to work well, it must:

have known end points (a permanent and fixed recovery site),

redundant hardware and software, and

a cadre of personnel dedicated to maintaining identical configurations at the remote recovery facility as are present at the production site.

This helps explain why "geo-clustering" has not become the dominant paradigm of disaster recovery methodology after nearly forty years of trying. This does not, however, diminish the need to reduce the time-to data of recovery strategies - especially for "always-on" applications. Certain application functions need to be available non-stop or in very short order following an interruption event.
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Backup Window Must be Planned For

September 12th, 2011

Rather than add more bandwidth, or invest in expensive, dedicated storage networks, WAN optimization can improve IP network performance sufficient to turn recovery into continuity. To help meet the objectives outlined above, a WAN optimization solution must be able to do three separate tasks for true business continuity: restrict bandwidth to backup applications during the allowed window and allocate it to critical applications in the event of a disaster, overcome latency and bandwidth limitations on the wire, and provide acceleration to roaming or displaced users redirected to alternative data sources.

Regardless of whether the data is being replicated from a massive cabinet, over IP-based storage or off a users hard drive for compliance purposes, during the backup window maximum bandwidth should be available to ensure completion. This requires granular bandwidth management that can isolate applications on the network and provide a predictable, policy-based service level. Further, the solution should be able to distinguish between a user initiated file copy and one started by the backup daemon, and apply different bandwidth allocations to each.

Also, the solution must remove latency and protocol inefficiencies that constrain current WAN backups. Caching and compression technology combined with inline protocol optimization of commonly used file transfer protocols form a technology suite that improves the performance characteristics of a WAN, adding bandwidth and reducing the time needed to complete backups and restores. Moreover, it should be able to do this for individual devices and accommodate displaced and roaming users without the need for bulky appliances.
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Testing key to business continuity plan success

September 8th, 2011
Without access to critical data in the first 24 hours after a crisis, forty percent of all businesses will fail. Such dire risk can be avoided by performing regular evaluations of your IT recovery process. Testing reveals not only whether the process can technically recover your servers, applications and data, but also the risk of any excess complexity.

A well-developed IT disaster recovery plan will identify all key processes and expose any weaknesses, and the ideal way to uncover these is through testing. Just as the best travel guides flow from real experiences at the destination, so the best disaster recovery plans flow real experiences from actual testing.

New technology makes regular, even daily testing feasible. This automation provides a foundation for ongoing RTO and RPO reporting at a management level, allowing you to better estimate and mitigate risks for the business.

To ensure you reach your objectives, perform a true recovery test on a critical server and capture these crucial observations:

How long did recovery take?

What data proved challenging to recover?

Were all applications and related software returned to the exact state expected?

Was the recovery process feasible for IT staff operating under stress with reduced tools?

How would parallel recoveries amplify the challenges?

Learning from these questions on a single test will yield greater insight into your IT disaster recovery posture. Though obviously a sensible practice, human nature often postpones such disciplined testing, since historically it has been cumbersome, time-consuming, or simply impossible without unacceptable disruption.
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Cloud as a Backup Solution for a Disaster Plan

September 5th, 2011
A cloud based backup approach for a disaster recovery plan lets you determine the ideal mixture of capital and operational expenditures. For budgeting purposes, recovery capabilities can be tiered to reflect the unique value and restoration requirements of different types of data, and storage processes can easily be tuned to comply with updated business procedures.

It is the selective use of the cloud lets you choose any combination of the following, a mix you can freely adjust as your needs evolve.

Cloud or Software as a Service (SaaS) - Your data is protected in a secure data center and hardware and software is managed for you, including all necessary support and professional services. Protecting your data in the cloud also gives you the inherent benefit of offsite disaster recovery. If your goal is to make life as simple as possible for your IT team but still make sure your data is safe and easily accessible.

On-Premise - You manage all the hardware and software you need under your roof. Pre-configured, all-in-one appliances are available to simplify deployment and maintenance and speed backup and recovery cycles. You can choose to maintain your infrastructure with your own team, outsource this responsibility to a certified local provider, or take advantage of both internal and external resources.

Hybrid - With the increasingly popular cloud-connected model, certain categories of information can be stored in the cloud, while those that need to be instantly available can reside onsite - or a primary backup can reside in one (onsite or in the cloud) with replication to the other. This method offers the greatest flexibility to choose the right blend of capital and operational
expenditures.
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Banks are not immune to security outages

August 17th, 2011
Firefox users may have had trouble accessing JPMorgan Chase's website chase.com when the bank experienced problems with an outdated security certificate.

According to a Chase spokesman, the Firefox certificate was updated on the bank's servers in about 45 minutes, resolving the issue.

A year ago, Chase experienced a more severe outage that shut out millions of customers from its online banking site for three days.

That earlier outage stemmed from a failure related to Chase's user authentication database.

Web Security Threats

This outage involved a lapsed security certificate. Website servers present certificates to a customer's browsers to verify identities. This certificate, which has information such as the address of the site, is verified by a third party that is trusted by a user's computer.

A certificate that is outdated or lapsed would appear as having been revoked by the issuing server.

While short-lived, today's outage was still a major issue, according to a market research firm.

"No bank wants its customers to be presented with the message, "you may be communicating with an attacker," an analyst wrote in a blog.

He said if the issue hadn't been resolved quickly, Chase could have ended up paying out reimbursements to customers unable to pay bills on time.
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What is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

August 14th, 2011
CIOs, CSO's, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Managers constantly will work to improve their rescue point objective (RPO) plus recovery time objectives (RTO) as a result of performing fast, non-disruptive backups, and even by performing data recovery. All comprehensive data protection solutions involve many issues and contingencies.

Here are a few of the things that can break with your data and therefore the backup requirements that ought to be addressed:

Accidental or malicious deletion of critical data - Requirement that provides to be able to quickly and easily bring back individual files and version.

Data that is wasted or corrupted over time - Requirement to jiggle back individual records to renovate database corruptions. The ability to get better data from any previous point in time, and have it as granular as you can.

A crashed disk - Requirement to recover a disk volume is special than recovering a individual file, but it should be done just as fast, and with automation to keep operational disruptions to a minimum.

A server failure - Requirement recover operations when replacing a broken server may well be complicated by the desire to install different drivers over the new system if the hardware seriously isn't an exact match. It helps to give the capability to move the required forms workload to a standby server (with unique hardware) or virtual server while the system is being swapped out or repaired.

A local or regional disaster - Requirement once you lose an entire work to fire, flood, and / or other disaster, have a pre-existing copy of your you important information in another location that is definitely outside the disaster sector.

Remote offices and part offices - Requirement to experience a process in place to revive with minimal technical sustain as remote and branch offices often will not have the luxury of acquiring an on-site technical resource that can assist in backups and restores.

Resource-intensive backup processes - Requirement frequent or continuous backup that is not resource-intensive.

Security breaches - Obligation to secure data. When ever moving data between websites, it needs to always be protected from potential security measure breaches. A breach of data security, whether actual damage is over or not, can be devastating to all your company's reputation, as dozens of substantial enterprises and government agencies have found a lot.
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10 commnadments of disaster recovery and business continuity planning

August 8th, 2011
As requirements for avoiding downtime become increasingly stringent, administrators need tools and platforms that can help them plan, design, and implement disaster recovery strategies that can meet those needs.

Analyze single points of failure: A single point of failure in a critical component can disrupt well engineered redundancies and resilience in the rest of a system.

Keep Updated notification trees: A cohesive communication process is required to ensure the disaster recovery business continuity plan will work.

Be aware of current events: Understand what is happening around the enterprise - know if there is a chance for a weather, sporting or political event that can impact the enterprise's operations.

Plan for worst-case scenarios: Downtime can have many causes, including operator error, component failure, software failure, and planned downtime as well as building- or city-level disasters. Organizations should be sure that their disaster recovery plans account for even worst-case scenarios.

Clearly document recovery processes: Documentation is critical to the success of a disaster recovery program. Organizations should write and maintain clear, concise, detailed steps for failover so that secondary staff members can manage a failover should primary staff members be unavailable.

Centralize information - Have a printed copy available: In a crisis situation, a timely response can be critical. Centralizing disaster recovery information in one place, such as a Microsoft Office SharePoint® system or portal, helps avoid the need to hunt for documentation, which can compound a crisis.

Create test plans and scripts: Test plans and scripts should be created and followed step-by-step to help ensure accurate testing. These plans and scripts should include integration testingsilo testing alone does not accurately reflect multiple applications going down simultaneously.

Retest regularly: Organizations should take advantages of opportunities for disaster recovery testing such as new releases, code changes, or upgrades. At a minimum, each application should be retested every year.

Perform comprehensive recovery and business continuity test: Organizations should practice their master recovery plans, not just application failover. For example, staff members need to know where to report if a disaster occurs, critical conference bridges should be set up in advance, a command center should be identified, and secondary staff resources should be assigned in case the event stretches over multiple days. In environments with many applications, IT staff should be aware of which applications should be recovered first and in what order. The plan should not assume that there will be enough resources to bring everything back up at the same time.

Defined metrics and create score cards scores: Organizations should maintain scorecards on the disaster recovery compliance of each application, as well as who is testing and when. Maintaining scorecards generally helps increase audit scores.

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Backup and retention policy

July 29th, 2011
Typically disaster recovery is designed to match traditional IT boundaries - physical servers, storage arrays, network devices, applications, etc.- and primarily based on over-provisioning of resources. Most servers and data stores are backed up locally to tape, if possible, requiring local IT staff to manage backup software, schedules, tape libraries, and offsite archiving. When failure occurs, multiple, complex processes must be coordinated to separately recover and reconfigure servers and data sets, often in multiple locations. As a result, recovery times are often too long and unpredictable.

Distributed, tape-based backup also suffers from geographic limitations: it can be prohibitively expensive to ship tapes long distances, and the farther they must be shipped, the longer it will take to recover in the event of disaster. This has led many firms to situate recovery sites too close to primary sites, significantly increasing the risk of catastrophic failure due to a major event (power grid failure, hurricane, etc.) affecting a large geographic area.
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Disaster Recovery Planning a critical mandate

July 19th, 2011

Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning is a critical mandate for all companies and especially for small and midsized businesses, where the cost pf downtime and/or lost data can be devastating. It does not take a cataclysmic event to cause major disruption the untimely loss of a critical server or file for even a few hours can be extremely costly in today's highly competitive 24x7 business climate.

If you have implemented virtualization - cloud computing, you already know how this powerful technology can save you money on IT costs via server consolidation. But are you aware that the benefits of virtualization extend beyond IT cost savings, and that virtualization can also keep your business running through many types of planned and unplanned IT outages?

Many regulations require companies to support more stringent availability standards. Several new acts and regulations, directed at specific industries or a broad cross-section of companies, mandate the protection of business data and system availability. Businesses may incur financial or legal penalties for failing to comply with these data or business availability requirements.
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Calcuating the cost of downtime

July 4th, 2011

A company experiences downtime for a variety of reasons and varying lengths of time. But the reality is that if your business does not even know the price of a single hour of downtime, you will most likely not commit resources to an adequate backup plan. While it is difficult to conceive of the total cost of an extended disaster or to quantify the intangible costs such as customer and employee satisfaction, it is a relatively simple process to determine the monetary losses one hour of downtime will incur. Once that number is determined it will be easy to calculate longer-term effects.

One analyst firm estimated that yearly downtime costs average 3.6% of annual revenue. For a business making $20 million that would translate into losses of $720,000 - money that would be much better spent growing the company. Of course, that cost is an average, with more lengthy and harmful outrages potentially causing exponentially higher losses.

Not all downtime is created equal: A brief outage in the middle of the night when a company is closed may incur little cost and no impact, while a prolonged total failure during the height of holiday sales can be devastating in both regards. The impact of downtime is felt in a variety of ways, and may be immediate or have long term repercussions.

Over the past several years, it has been estimated the hourly costs of downtime for computer networks at an average of $42,000. A typical company experiencing an average of 87 hours of downtime per year, that is $3.6 million annually. And for companies that rely entirely on technology, such as online brokerages, trading platforms, and e-commerce sites, hourly downtime risks can be $1 million or more, making availability an even greater concern.
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Virtualization adds to complexity of disaster and business continuity planning

July 4th, 2011
Cloud computing -- virtualization offers compelling business advantages. It can reduce your capital expenditures, gives greater benefits from resources that are already invested in, and provides more flexibility in applying those resources to the business services that are most critical to the enterprise. However, because virtualization introduces management complexity into an already complex environment, it can also drive up operational expenditures and the complexity of disaster and business continuity planning.

The key to getting the benefits and avoiding the risks is obtaining detailed visibility into all the elements and interdependencies of the cloud - virtual infrastructure. Traditional, manual techniques of mapping IT environments won't work - they are error-prone and cumbersome, and the results are incomplete and quickly out of date.
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CIO - Job Description - Salary - IT - News

Can you use the cloud for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?

Core disaster recovery planning questions

Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption

Disaster Preparedness equals risk, resilience and effective disaster recovery planning

Importance of data recovery for mid-sized companies

What is ISO 27031:2011

Mirrored DR architecture

National Preparedness Goal released

Social network integrated in disaster recovery template

Budgeting for business continuity

Backup Window Must be Planned For

Testing key to business continuity plan success

Cloud as a Backup Solution for a Disaster Plan

Banks are not immune to security outages

Web Security Threats

What is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

10 commnadments of disaster recovery and business continuity planning

Backup and retention policy

Disaster Recovery Planning a critical mandate

Calcuating the cost of downtime

Virtualization adds to complexity of disaster and business continuity planning