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Disaster Recovery Planning News Feed - 30 items

Core disaster recovery planning questions

May 17th, 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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Create Your Data Protection Strategy

April 29th, 2012
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
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Setting up a remote disaster recovery site

April 14th, 2012
During the disaster recovery planning process a CIO needs to establish a remote disaster recovery site, but are faced a challenge all too familiar to many enterprises: How to replicate large amounts of data across the country and still meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)?

For example if the goal of full data recovery within 3 hours, with an RPO of 24 hours. CIOsoften are not coming close to meeting those objectives as replication process mat not able to complete across the WAN. A company simply may not be able to move that much data over long distances in a reasonable amount of time without very expensive and time consuming manual intervention.

More specifically, given the limited physical space in their data centers and the high volume of traffic that needed to be moved between data centers, the company may require a very high capacity virtual WAN optimization solution.
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Cloud as a Backup Solution for a Disaster Plan

April 2nd, 2012
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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Most organizations have business continuity plans in place

March 16th, 2012

Most enterprises have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place, however in a review of 128 companies that have recently has to activate their disaster plans Janco has found that 64% do not have and or have not followed the protocols to ensure the safety of their employees and critical security needs of their information assets.

2011 had a wide range of events that impacted the operations in many organizations around the globe. While weather was the most common cause of organizational disruption, other significant events included strikes (which caused problems for 55 percent of managers), the Blackberry outage (39 percent), the civil disturbances (26 percent), natural disasters such as the Japan earthquake and tsunami (19 percent), and international social and political unrest such as the Arab Spring uprising (18 percent).

This wide range of threats has prompted business continuity management to become increasingly. After a sharp increase in business continuity management uptake over the past two years 61 percent of managers now work for an organization that has Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans in place.
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Disaster Preparedness equals risk, resilience and effective disaster recovery planning

March 1st, 2012
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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What should CIO and Recovery Manager Plan for?

February 25th, 2012
Downtime and loss of data, even if temporary, can have long-lasting effects for business and can contribute to the demise of the otherwise well-lubed business:

Loss of revenue from your customers' inability to do business with you

Diminished market credibility and customer trust, resulting in churn

Penalties for violated SLAs with partners, suppliers, distributors, and franchisees

Costs of recovering and repairing the lost data

Legal costs of meeting internal and external compliance requirements

How do you balance the disaster recovery risk and investment equation? Is the potential risk greater than the investment? Some facts:

43% of companies experiencing disasters never reopen, and 29% close within two years.

93% of businesses that lost their data center for 10 days went bankrupt within one year.

40% of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours.

CIOs and Business Continuity Managers should plan for all situations in which normal operations are disrupted and have practices and technologies in place that enable them to deal with potential disruption from hostile, external actions as well as internal system failures.
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DHS sets its IT Priorities

February 16th, 2012
DHS CIO Council has set its fiscal 2012 initiatives.

The five mission areas are:

Preventing terrorism and enhancing security

Securing and managing borders

Enforcing and administrating immigration laws

Safeguarding and securing cyberspace

Ensuring resilience to disasters
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Disaster Recovery Planning a critical mandate

February 11th, 2012

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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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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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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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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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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