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Disaster Recovery Business Continuity for Remote Offices
Data residing outside the data center at remote and branch offices (ROBOs) accounts for a significant portion of an enterprise's information store, yet it often either is protected with inefficient backup processes or is not protected at all -- leaving companies at risk on many fronts.
In a recent research report, high priority projects for ROBOs included improving information security measures; ensuring compliance with government, industry or corporate governance mandates; and improving Disaster Recovery Business Continuity processes.
- more infoDRP and Security Plans key to compliance
Preparing for a disaster requires detailed planning, preparation and testing. Knowing what IT assets need to be recovered, where to recover them and how to recover them are the essence of IT Disaster Recovery. The most difficult challenge is mapping the prioritized business requirements to the IT assets so that recovery can be staged. The recovery strategy then evolves based on the available options which support the required recovery objectives. The resulting Disaster Recovery plans contain all of the information detailing where to go, who is to do what and the information required to rebuild servers, restore applications and data as well as restart and synchronization procedures. - more info
DRP Template
If you are new to recovery planning, make sure that you research the subject thoroughly before embarking on a disaster recovery project. Consider engaging a consultant (internal or external to your organization) to help you in your project planning effort. Disaster recovery planning is not a two-month project, neither is it a project that once completed, you can forget about. An effective recovery plan is a live recovery plan. The plan must be maintained current and tested/exercised regularly.
The primary objective of a Business Resumption Plan is to enable an organization to survive a disaster and to reestablish normal business operations. In order to survive, the organization must assure that critical operations can resume normal processing within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, the goals of the Business Resumption Plan should be to:
- Identify weaknesses and implement a disaster prevention program;
- minimize the duration of a serious disruption to business operations;
- facilitate effective co-ordination of recovery tasks; and
- reduce the complexity of the recovery effort.
Why is diaster and business continuity planning important
Federal, State and Local Governments are chartered to mitigate and control the event, provide life and safety measures, and then restore infrastructures. The Red Cross provides emergency relief in the form of food, health and shelter. If insured, an insurance company will settle damage claims and provide monetary relief. However, none of these organizations will, or can, recover your business. Your companys recovery is strictly up to you, and it commences with a solid business continuity/disaster recovery plan.
Should your company experience a disaster, the first 72 hours following the incident will be the most critical in your recovery efforts. How you respond during that period will determine if your business will survive or not. Furthermore, the most important hour is the one immediately following the event. If ever required, your Business continuity plan will enable you to respond in a systematic and organized fashion. It will guide your organization, step-by-step, from responding to the actual event all the way through to full occupancy of your repaired facility.
- more infoSimple Disaster Planning Activities
Creating a disaster recovery plan is a complex task; however there are a number of basic steps that you can follow to start thre process
- Prepare your systems, processes, and people for an organized response to disaster when it strikes.
- Identify critical IT systems and develop a long-range strategy.
- Select and train your disaster recovery team.
- Conduct a Business Impact Analysis.
- Determine risks to your business from natural or human-made causes.
- Get management support.
- Create appropriate plan documents.
- Test your plan.
Disaster Plan & Business Continuity Infrastructure
The key technology
elements of a Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan (DRP/BCP)
infrastructure are the primary data center, a remote site that duplicates the
resources in that primary location and the method used to get files (master and
transaction) between the two sites - such as high-bandwidth network
connections. The best DRP/BCP strategies follow a "redundant every-thing"
philosophy throughout the data center. Multiple mainframes and servers should
run in the production and backup data facilities. Then, if a component in the
production system encounters problems, it immediately fails over to the local
backup as a first line of defense.
Power supplies and communication links are one of the most critical components in a DRP/BCP strategy.
White House email system down for a day
High tech White House falls down when its email disaster plan does not work.
The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced at a 1:45 p.m. press briefing that he was unable to send out the customary week-ahead memo as the White House e-mail system was "not working so well." D.C. reporters got their next e-mail from the White House around 8:30 the following morning indicating that the outage lasted most of a day.
- more infoHow to calculate the cost of downtime
One overlooked truth is that downtime costs accelerate in a non-linear fashion every hour. If a system fails for five minutes, the costs are fairly low because manual methods (paper and pencil) of making records or communicating by telephone instead of e-mails can suffice to conduct business. Over an extended period, however, the volume of work overwhelms the manual processes. Yet some businesses - such as Amazon or e-Bay - cannot run at all on manual processes. Business and financial operations increasingly deteriorate, and the rate of dollar losses grows - sometimes to the point of fatally damaging the business.
In addition, when assessing the financial impact of downtime, you need to consider factors such as potential lost revenue, reductions in worker productivity, and damaged market reputation. In some cases, downtime can even reduce shareholder confidence, which can create unnecessary and unplanned costs. Financial analysts and accountants at your company can help you come up with the factors at your company that are affected by downtime and contribute to its costs.
- more infoDisaster Planning Considerations
Many enterprises have taken a segmented approach to
Business Continuity and Availability, adding
point technology and reactive services to address disaster recovery. This
approach can be very complex, time-consuming and
costly. The task becomes much easier when a single vendor takes responsibility for architecting, implementing, testing
and supporting the solution.
There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations
requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, ESG research indicates that 36%
of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other
adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their
mission-critical applications. Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any
downtime.
Many Businesses Fail After a Disaster
Businesses'
reliance on IT systems and digital data has never been greater. The 2007 Best's
Underwriting Guide found that only 6% of companies that suffer catastrophic data
loss survive while 43% never reopen and 51% close within 2 years of the
disaster. Best's Underwriting Guide 2007 also found that 93% of the companies
that did not have their data backed up in the event of a disaster went out of
business. An analysis of SMBs' prioritization of disaster recovery, backup and
high availability for 2008 shows that businesses understand the risks to their
business and the value of protection. However, many organizations still think
that backup is a sufficient disaster recovery plan. However, mid-sized
enterprises are at the most risk to disaster and are more likely to rely
strictly on backup as a disaster recovery plan.
The needs and resources of mid-market
firms are unique. Midsized companies must work with limited finances
infrastructure and human resources. Robust disaster recovery used to be
affordable and manageable only by large enterprises. Mid-sized enterprises
relied more on backup than on a formal disaster recovery plan. As businesses'
reliance on IT has grown, backup has increasingly shown its weaknesses. However,
the introduction and maturation of several key technologies, such as
virtualization, have brought affordable and easily implementable Disaster Recovery and Business
Continuity to small and mid-sized companies. SMBs do not always equate
virtualization with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity because
awareness of the many virtualization applications is just starting to
grow.
Number of Mission Critical Applications Increases
More processes are "mission-critical" as up to 60% of all applications in US-based medium-to-large enterprises are considered business-critical today (including email, collaboration, and intranet applications and data). This evolution demands that more systems, in more locations, that rely on more timely and sensitive data, be covered by Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning, and requires that datacenter operations teams provide tier-1 application support and data protection for a growing percentage of applications. - more info
Threats drive need for disaster and business continuity plans
With the ever changing economic climate and security threats, downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From CIOs to the Executive Suite, managers have seen the importance of business uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and profitability. The Disaster Planning Template provides a road map to the most effective strategies and technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.
Planning for recovery - designing and implementing a solution to reduce the amount of recovery time needed after an interruption -is a pressing requirement for businesses of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan that ensures that both data and applications can be recovered quickly, IT managers are generally confronted with several challenges:
- How can we ensure our applications and data are recoverable without impacting business operations?
- Do we have data protection strategies available to us that meet my recovery point and recovery time objectives?
- Can we afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both local and remote (disaster) recovery requirements?
- Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet our requirements?
Disaster Recovery Planning International Standard Set by Janco
Update to the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity
Template has just been released by Janco Associates.. Park City,
UT - The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Planning template
has been sold to enterprise in over 65 countries around the globe. With
the release the latest verison of the template it is in complete
compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver 3), ISO 17799, and PCI
DSS. The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been
purchased for use in over 65 countries around the globe including: The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has
been purchased for use in government, public, and private enterprises in
almost all industries including:Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template Now Accepted as
the International Standard
M V Janulaitis the CEO of Janco said, "Our DRP /BCP Template has
been accepted by enterprise around the globe as the standard for disaster
recovery plan and business continuity plan creation." In response to that need
Janco has updated its "Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template" by
increasing the content of the template as well as updating the entire document
to be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver. 3), ISO 17799, and PCI
DSS.
- more info
Outsouring Can Help in Disaster Recovery Planning
Between hackers, natural disasters, or even a pipe breaking in the office above yours, every business needs a contingency plan. It could mean the difference between riding out a problem and going out of business. For this reason, most businesses are concerned about the safety of their backups. Data loss is a significant concern for any business - and in healthcare and other industries can have huge financial consequences. Solutions typically require that you spend more money on a third party backup solution. Outsourcing is one solution that should not be overlooked. Solutions typically require that you spend more money on a third party backup solution. Outsourcing is one solution that should not be overlooked. - more info
Guidelines for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
Disaster
recovery and business continuity are important business issues that require
awareness and planning. Guidelines
that can be used in this process are:
-
Look at the big picture - your business processes, systems, networks, data, and people all need to be considered when planning and implementing these processes.
-
Understand your levels of tolerance for lost work, missing data, and unproductive time.
-
Document and test your plans, and update them when business needs change.
-
Configure your environment to minimize the likelihood of a failure escalating into a disaster.
-
When evaluating technology solutions, take into account meeting your recovery objectives, kinds of disasters you're likely to face, and levels of cost, complexity, and disruption involved.
-
Know the advantages and limitations of each technology, and adjust your expectations accordingly.
-
Remember that backing up your data is the most reliable form of protection, without which your business is vulnerable.
Budget cuts impact disaster plans
IT staff cuts spurred by the economy are likely to continue throughout the remainder of the year. According to a survey of 300 IT center managers last year, half of all data centers were planning to cut 2010 budgets by an average of 15%. Respondents at 14% of those companies said the cuts would include layoffs of IT staffers.
The PayPal electronic payment system is one of many
Internet-based services that have been hit with outages. And based on news
reports, the number of such incidents appears to have been increasing in recent
months, analysts said. They cited shutdowns of the Google Apps software hosted
by Google Inc., outages at data centers run by Rackspace Hosting Inc. and a
distributed denial-of-service attack on Twitter.
Observers pointed to several possible reasons for the apparent uptick in online outages, including IT budget and personnel cutbacks, increasing corporate dependence on hosted applications -- and bad luck. Companies are not doing the maintenance we should be doing, and when you do not do maintenance, they increase the probability of catastrophic failure.
- more infoWhich Files Need to be backed up
Hard
drives often contain hundreds of thousands of files. Many of them should be
backed up every day, others only occasionally, and still others - including temp
files, the hibernation file, and your browser cache--not at all.
- Documents: You should back up your word processing files, spreadsheets, and similar documents every day. Most basic backup program perform incremental backups, in which the program copies only the files that have changed since the most recent previous backup. (Several backup programs also perform versioning; they keep several iterations of the same file on hand and enable you to choose which version to restore.)
- Recent Documents: If your backup program can handle incremental backups, you don't have to worry about recent documents as separate entities. But if you often work on these files on other people's computers, you may want to carry a copy of them on a flash drive or store a copy of them online.
- Application Data: Applications create and maintain data files such as e-mail messages, browser favorites, calendar entries, and contacts that require daily backing up. Many programs store them in a hidden folder inside your user folder (in XP, C:\Documents and Settings\your name\Application Data; in Vista, C:\Users\your name\AppData). Also, in XP, Microsoft stores Outlook and Outlook Express data in C:\Documents and Settings\your name\Local Settings\Application Data). Fortunately, any well-designed backup program intended for everyday, nonexpert users (as opposed to IT departments) knows where to look for Outlook data.
- Operating System: You can always reinstall Windows and your apps, if you have the original discs or can download the programs. But if Windows becomes unusable or your hard drive crashes, switching to a system backup (also called a disaster recovery backup) that you create a couple of times a year can get your machine up and running smoothly without much effort.
- Media: These large files require a separate backup strategy because of the amount of storage space they require..
- Heirlooms: Files that you want to keep forever need backing up and extra protection.
Cost of email downtime is high
In today's economy, the importance of e-mail takes on new meaning. Recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) are no longer general rules. The Exchange administrator's ability to meet or exceed the proverbial lines in the sand, in terms of time to recover and the age of the data recovered, can mean the difference between gainful employment and prepping for a job interview. In fact, average yearly cost of Exchange downtime for a 500-person corporation, according to data derived from the Contingency Planning Association and Strategic Research, is over $1.5 million.
Disaster Recovery Planning Template Business Continuity Plan
Sarbanes - Oxley - ISO 27000 (27001 & 27002) - HIPAA - PCI- Compliant
Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) template can be used by any size enterprise. The template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. The Disaster Recovery Planning Documentation comes as a Word document and includes:
- Disaster Recovery Plan Template
- Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
- Work Plan
- Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Audit Program
Included in the template is Business Impact Questionnaire as
well as a full Job Description for the Disaster Recovery Manager. The
premium edition contains 11 full job descriptions.
Communication during a recovery process often is not well planned
Effective crisis communication requires technology to provide a
unified solution for communicating information to all involved constituents and
should provide a single source of accurate and up-todate information that can be
accessed.
Disaster recovery
and emergency team members status communication and news have distinct
audiences with different needs when a crisis occurs.
Continuous Data Protection can be used as a backup strategy for DRP amd BCP
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is an increasingly popular disk-based backup strategy. It is replication with an Undo button. Every time a block of data changes on the system being backed up, it is transferred to the CDP system. However, unlike replication, CDP stores changes in a log, so you can undo those changes at a very granular level. In fact, you can recover the system to literally any point in time at which data was stored within the CDP system.
A near-CDP system works in similar fashion except that it has
discrete points in time to which it can recover. To put it another way, near-CDP
combines snapshots with replication. Typically, a snapshot is taken on the
system being backed up, whereupon that snapshot is replicated to another system
that holds the backup.
Why take the snapshot on the source before
replication? Because only at the source can you typically quiesce the
application writing to the storage so that the snapshot will be a meaningful
one.