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Security Myths
Security Manual Template
ISO 27000 Compliant
Sarbanes-Oxley / HIPAA / CobiT
PCI-DSS Complaint
The Top 10
Information Security Myths
MYTH #1: Organizations are more secure now than they were a year ago.
Most companies have initiated the necessary steps to safeguard their company assets. Information security has moved from a business cost to a business enabler. However, new threats and technologies are constantly and rapidly changing the network landscape. System administrators must scan the network continually for known security weaknesses, keep their skills current and, most important, reexamine corporate security policies periodically. Business processes defined a year ago may not match the organization's current needs.
MYTH #2: The presence or absence of regulations greatly matters when it comes to protecting customer data.
With or without a legal requirement, organizations still should safeguard their sensitive information. Failure to protect customers' personal data means a loss in consumer confidence, which results in lost revenue and government fines. Regulations and laws are getting the attention of C-level executives and forcing them to invest in information security initiatives, but don't be misled into thinking regulations mean data is protected.
MYTH #3: External consultants know more about information security than in-house personnel do.
People believe consultants have tools and advanced training that's lacking internally. But that's not always true. Before hiring an outside consultant, be sure you haven't overlooked your staff. Network and system administrators often make good full-time security personnel because they handle security problems as part of their daily duties. You might find you already have the required skills in-house -- all that's needed is some training classes. Training in-house personnel demonstrates your commitment to providing employees growth and career opportunities.
Consider using an outside consultant on an as-needed basis to supplement the skills of your staff. If you decide to bring in outside services, thoroughly validate the consultant's qualifications and experience. Be sure to check references. Outside consultants also can provide a good business partnership beyond the services outlined in a contract. Having an internal contact person well-placed within the organization can help foster a better working partnership and help staff view the consultant as a valuable team member.
MYTH #4: Information security must be managed as a separate business unit to be effective.
You may think keeping information security people together in one department is a good idea. After all, information security professionals all speak the same language and deal with similar concerns. However, a single security group would have to deal with all the business units that have some level of security as part of their charters. If you keep your information security professionals in one group, you risk alienating the business groups with which they'll need to work to conduct security awareness and training programs.
Top-level management must realize that information security is not solely the responsibility of IT, but rather an enterprise function that must mandate input from all business units so each unit can ensure its needs, concerns and mission statements are met. Smart organizations are starting to realize that security has evolved into an enterprise-wide support division, rather than an isolated group dedicated solely to protecting servers. Security professionals can offer cost management, build a stronger focus on customer relations, and help identify and communicate growth opportunities throughout the organization.
MYTH #5: Complex, frequently changed passwords will make my enterprise secure.
No one would argue that a 16-character password is easy to guess. But it's also hard to remember. If you require users to change passwords every 60 days, they'll be writing down their passwords, which is exactly what you don't want. Instead, create a flexible password policy that lets users create simple yet inconspicuous passwords. Written password security policies should be governed by the organization, not the end user. However, each end user must be held accountable for managing and safeguarding his or her own password. Passwords written on Post-It notes or stored in Excel spreadsheets are far bigger threats to security than password cracking.
MYTH #6: The padlock icon present during an SSL session means my data is safe.
This is untrue. That tiny padlock icon found at the bottom of a Web site is a sign that data sent between your device and the site is encrypted -- it doesn't mean the Web site itself is safe. And keep in mind that data sent isn't stored on the Web site, but on a server, and how well an organization safeguards its server is a bigger security risk than the communication transmission itself. Nothing is 100 percent secure, and even sites using 128-bit encryption can be compromised.
MYTH #7: Migrating from Internet Explorer to Firefox will make my enterprise secure.
If a vulnerability is discovered in your browser, your computers are susceptible to compromise, no matter which browser you're running. The real risk lies in users continuing to click on virus-infected attachments, which are browser-agnostic.
As the popularity of Firefox increases, so does the number of exposed flaws. Small shops and individual users shouldn't find switching to Mozilla's Firefox a problem -- after all, it's targeted at that user base. However, mid- to large-size enterprises may find that Firefox isn't quite ready for the enterprise, despite its better security. First, Firefox lacks a management system, making it difficult for administrators to control how the browser is used. Second, if your company has several Web-based applications built around Internet Explorer, migrating to Firefox will incur development costs in addition to deploying Firefox to your users. Instead, restrict Internet browsing activity to "what access is needed" and "who needs it." Teaching proper browsing behavior will keep your organization much safer than worrying about which browser you use.
MYTH #8: Increased security spending results in greater security.
This is false. Organizations often use some sort of metric to justify security spending. This can result in spending more money for security products, but not actually building a more secure enterprise. Every company has a unique risk profile that will determine its required security investment. You can't generalize security needs. Instead, establish a risk management profile, manage those risks within a given budget and purchase wisely to meet the needed security level. But don't spend your entire information security budget on hardware and software. Security is as much a matter of awareness as technology, so be sure to spend appropriately on training and educating your users and customers. It's also vital to make security a visible and important part of your organizational culture.
MYTH #9: Wireless networks aren't secure.
Wireless networks, in their early incarnation, were considered less secure than wired networks because the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) protocol had numerous security holes. Today, however, there are security methodologies and technologies that can be used in place of WEP. Having a good understanding of the 802.11i wireless standard and the 802.1x authentication standard will assist you in properly designing and configuring your wireless network. Although wireless is more susceptible to security problems than wired networking, IT professionals can make secure and effective use of wireless technology by building in additional security, properly managing the rich features found in Wi-Fi products and planning to take advantage of future Wi-Fi security enhancements.
MYTH #10: Dumping Windows for Linux will increase security.
With proper planning, you can securely deploy both Windows and Linux. Although there are more viruses written for the Windows platform, Linux isn't in the clear. Linux tends to have an advantage over Windows in that it's an open-source platform with a worldwide programming and security community supporting it. But an improperly configured Linux server is just as vulnerable as any Windows server.
So, should you dump Windows and migrate to Linux? For the majority of enterprises, the answer is no. While more software is becoming available for the Linux platform, organizations will have a hard time finding Linux versions of everything they need to run their businesses. The work associated with migrating to Unix -- testing applications to see if they function properly on the platform and retraining users -- makes the switch cost-prohibitive and not a viable long-term solution. The better alternative is to use Linux where it performs best -- as the underlying OS on appliances and powering high-end workstations and file servers.
Security Management News
Can you use the cloud for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?
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?
- more infoCore disaster recovery planning questions
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.
Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption
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"
Disaster Preparedness equals risk, resilience and effective disaster recovery planning
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.
- more infoImportance of data recovery for mid-sized companies
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.
- more infoWhat is ISO 27031:2011
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.
Mirrored DR architecture
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.
- more infoNational Preparedness Goal released
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)
- more infoSocial network integrated in disaster recovery template
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.
- more infoBudgeting for business continuity
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.
- more infoBackup Window Must be Planned For
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.
Testing key to business continuity plan success
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.
Cloud as a Backup Solution for a Disaster Plan
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.
Banks are not immune to security outages
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.
- more infoWhat is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
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.
10 commnadments of disaster recovery and business continuity planning
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.
Backup and retention policy
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.
- more infoDisaster Recovery Planning a critical mandate
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.
- more infoCalcuating the cost of downtime
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.
- more infoVirtualization adds to complexity of disaster and business continuity planning
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.
- more infoRecovery time is focus of 57% of Business Continuity Managers
In a recent survey it was found that 57 percent of IT organizations see reducing recovery time in the event of IT failure and cutting the cost of backup as the two biggest 'pain-points' for backup and disaster recovery. The next most significant difficulties were the ability to roll back to any point in time when recovering workloads and recovery testing.
Virtualization is already in place with the majority of
those surveyed, with 86 percent of those questioned having a virtual
infrastructure in place within their organizations.
Other findings are:
- Tape backup is the most popular technology involved for recovery of virtual machines, with 60 percent of organizations relying on tape to protect their virtualization implementations. 53 percent of organizations are using disk-to-disk backup products, while proprietary virtualization products are used by 23 percent;
- 17 percent of organizations are only using tape backup for the backup / recovery of their virtual machines;
- The number of respondents that were able to judge their recovery point objectives (RPO) when it came to virtualized environments was much lower than those able to define their recovery time objectives (RTO) - only 45 percent of those surveyed were able to state their satisfaction level around their RPOs.
Cloud as a primary recovery source not there yet
According to a survey market research firm TheInfoPro, a mere 10 percent of large corporations are considering the public cloud as a place to store even their data -- even the lowest-tier info -- for archive purposes. I wasn't surprised to hear of these results.
Don't believe the survey? Look at recent news reports. Last year EMC announced it was shutting down its Atmos Online storage service because it was competing with its own resellers. Cloud storage provider Vaultscape also closed. Additionally, Iron Mountain said it had stopped accepting new customers for its Virtual File Store service and was doing a two-year glide to a complete shutdown. Finally, startup Cirtas Systems announced it was leaving the market to "regroup."
The on-demand storage market will eventually evolve, and acceptance will take
years, as we've seen with other emerging technologies in the past. In the
meantime, we could look at cloud storage services to be the first real cloud
failure. However, we learn from what did not work and plug on. Eventually, the
market will be there.
Consolidation and Disaster Planning
Most organizations today are faced with conflicting goals and challenges. They have geographically distributed workforces, with headquarters, datacenters, branch offices, and mobile workers scattered widely. Everyone needs to access email, file shares, and mission critical applications, and the speed of access directly ties to employee productivity. So computing resources have been widely deployed in many locations to give the local workers the best possible service delivery. However, this approach is now seen as wasteful and expensive with extra hardware and software to buy and maintain for many locations, and often few local IT staff to support the systems. As budgets get tighter, organizations are looking for solutions to handle this burden. IT consolidation is the number one approach today, taking infrastructure out of remote offices and into the main data center as a way to cut costs and boost IT staff productivity. The trick is how to consolidate without hurting the performance for the end users.
While consolidation can certainly bring a number of benefits to organizations, it will take more than just a Friday afternoon to ensure that your consolidation, disaster recovery, and business continuity projects are truly successful. As far too many IT managers will tell you, a poorly planned project will have your executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and IT in the hot seat to quickly undo all the effort that went into the project in the first place.
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Lay out a change and risk management strategy
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Develop a plan for resiliency
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Test (and improve) branch office performance & local consolidation
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Architect a forward-looking infrastructure & support plan
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Plan a phased roll-out
Create Your Data Protection Strategy
Create Your Data Protection Strategy key
considerations:
Backup/Recovery and Staging Tradeoff Tailoring your data protection solution to the right mix of staging and backup/recovery approaches is accomplished by defining the RTO and RPO for your various types of data based on the tradeoff between your business needs and cost.
Case for Archiving Your Static Data
- First, archives provide long-term protection of data for compliance purposes.
- Second, they make historical data available for repurposing in new applications.
- Third, archiving can provide performance benefits for your company. These performance benefits are realized in the following ways: Once static data is moved to an archive, it is no longer mixed in with your dynamic data, and therefore does not need to be backed up repeatedly. For most organizations, this means the time and storage required to complete a full backup can be reduced significantly. Plus, separating static data from your dynamic data can also significantly reduce the amount of time required to search for files.
Backup to Disk Using disk-based data protection techniques to protect your dynamic data and make disaster recovery copies will allow you to gain the most from your investment in data protection. Disk-based data protection enables faster recovery times and helps to dramatically reduce your administrative time and costs.
Real-Time Data Protection technologies provide your business with the maximum RTO and RPO benefits. Best-of-breed real-time data protection solutions will allow you to recover your data back to any point in time, down to the second, and some even work to provide a high-availability solution
- more infoDisaster 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.
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