Disaster Recovery Planning Business Continuity

British Oppose Disaster Planning Law - BBC: Environmental groups are campaigning against planning laws they claim will lead to "faceless bureaucrats" taking decisions on major projects. Opponents of the government's Planning Bill say it sweeps away local accountability for developments such as motorways and airports. Instead, they want people to have more say on the decisions that affect them.

The government says planning laws need reform to meet long-term challenges, such as those posed by climate change. The bill, currently going through Parliament, aims to replace the current system of holding a sometimes lengthy and expensive public inquiry each time a major infrastructure project is proposed, such as an airport or a power station.

People living near the proposed projects would have limited opportunities to object. The government argues that the reform is needed to ensure the planning system can "meet the long-term challenges we face as a society."

But the Planning Disaster Coalition, which include Friends of the Earth, the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England says the change will make a "mockery" of democracy, by taking away the rights of people to have their say on developments in their local area.

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Ways to Enhance Your Disaster Recovery Plan -

Threre a a number of ways in which an enterpriser can add value in their disaster recovery capabilities. For example, storage vendors are enhancing their replication capabilities, tools for rapid recovery for databases and core applications like Exchange are finding their way into organizations of all sizes, and virtualization has opened new disaster recovery opportunities to a wide range of organizations.

However, before placing the technology cart before the horse, a critical phase in any form of disaster recovery planning and design is to establish a solid understanding of applications and their interdependencies. A good initial step in this process is the establishment of a disaster recovery application inventory.

What should such an inventory include? While requirements can vary depending on the organization, a basic listing should include the following items:

Application name and description
Business function -- the business unit or functional area the application supports
Business process -- the specific business process supported
Recovery objectives -- stated recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) targets for the application
Known related applications -- this includes both applications that act as sources and targets in the business process
Server details -- a list of the actual servers, both physical and virtual, on which the application resides, along with configuration details
Storage details -- the actual storage devices and logical unit numbers (LUN) allocated to the servers
Software requirements -- specific information about the software

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Disk-based vs. Tape Backup -

Disk-based vs. Tape Backup: The Pros and Cons All organizations use tape to back up data nightly. Tape is fairly inexpensive and low-tech, but managing and administering tape, backing up to tape and restoring files from it can be time consuming, unreliable and complex. Disk has always been an easier, more reliable alternative, but until recently its high acquisition cost has made it untouchable for many organizations. Fortunately, new disk and data reduction technologies have recently converged to make disk-based backup available at about the same price of tape backup systems.

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Disaster Planning and Security Management a Real Issue -

Consider the Herculean efforts today to protect the network from threats: Intrusion prevention systems scan packets for potentially damaging content; email security systems check for viruses in email content and firewalls block unsolicited connections. To stop the onslaught of threats to corporate and government networks, a host of software and appliances are being deployed daily . In general, these border police applications are doing a fairly decent job of stopping unauthorized intrusion at the door to your network.

But what about organizational insiders? Which applications or appliances are scrutinizing the information being passed out of the network? Intrusion prevention systems and firewalls arent looking for intellectual property sliding out the door right under their virtual noses. Specifically in healthcare organizations, what about patient information sent unprotected over the Internet to another provider? Add in the always-changing regulatory environment, and security is a unique challenge. All it takes is one misstep to compromise sensitive information. These are legitimate, authorized users communicating in an above-board way but potentially exposing sensitive data in the process. This is the core of the immensely complex problem of data loss.

To address the data loss problem, organizations need to focus now on content filtering and blocking of electronic communications leaving the network and not just email, but instant messaging (IM), webmail, HTTP and FTP communications as well . All avenues of electronic communication need to be policed to prevent intellectual property, financial information, patient information, personal credit card data, and a variety of sensitive information (depending on the business and the industry) from falling into the wrong hands.

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How Do You Back Up Remote Sites -

The global enterprise has a voracious appetite for data, and little patience for downtime. According to a recent Forrester report, 82 percent of larger IT organizations rated improving recovery time as a critical or very critical business priority. The need for continued focus and investment is clear, especially when you consider that data-at-rest in enterprises is growing at a compounded rate of 55 percent a year. Moving all that data is a mounting challenge, and business simply cannot wait.

To meet these growing demands at a reasonable cost, organizations are moving to IP-based networks; 70 percent of North American and 79 percent of European organizations use some combination of the Internet, MPLS or Ethernet to connect to their primary backup datacenter. Bandwidth prices may be in decline, but that doesnt mean it comes cheap. Bandwidth, on average, is 29 percent of the total cost of replication, backup and recovery solutions, and is often constrained by the effects of latency.

End-to-end plans for turning disaster recovery into full business continuity are very complex, but from an IP-network perspective it can be reduced to three main challenges.

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IT and Business DRP challenges -

Disaster plan need to take into account mainframes, blade servers as well as distributed file servers. The problem is more complex as enterprises slowly move away from IT and Business alignment towards IT and Business convergence. For example, 3mMainframes continue to hold their own against the onslaught of distributed server architectures, not because they are considered superior to newer technologies but because they still have a unique role to play in the enterprise. Recent market research indicates that 90 percent of mainframe users see the devices as long-term data hub and transaction server solutions fully suited to expected future workloads, particularly in SOA and Web services endeavors. Distributed servers, meanwhile, are likely to appeal to specialized shops with low MIPS requirements.

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Disaster Recovery Plan Template
Business Continuity
ISO 27000 (formerly ISO 17799), Sarbanes - Oxley,
PCI-DSS & HIPAA Compliant

Disaster Planning Considerations

Disaster Recovery Plan Template Business Continuity ISO 27000 (formerly ISO 17799), Sarbanes - Oxley, PCI-DSS & HIPAA Compliant

Disaster Planning Considerations

Disaster Recovery Plan Template
Business Continuity
ISO 27000 (formerly ISO 17799), Sarbanes - Oxley,
PCI-DSS & HIPAA Compliant