Live Disaster Recovery News
DisasterRecovery and Business Continuity Planning Considerations for Email
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning considerations
are crucial when deploying any email system. Not only is it important to have a
plan in the event of a local outage, but careful consideration should also be
given to the chance of an entire site failure. In the event of a disaster, the
first system that needs to be brought online is communications. E-mail is the
ideal method of communication, but users need access and the environment has to
be able to withstand a major service interruption.
Issues
include, failing over to the backup site is a manual process and most systems do
not include a mechanism to fail back to the primary site. Getting the primary
site back online is a labor- and network-intensive process. Another is that most
email systems do not utilize compression, which results in additional network
bandwidth consumption.
What to do after you have created a Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan
Now that
you have a disaster recovery plan in place, you still have work to
do.
-
Test your disaster recovery plan at least
quarterly. Simply having a plan in place is not enough. Develop and
regularly (quarterly) test your plan so that the first time it is executed is
not during an emergency. Remember to test under realistic conditions and make
the plan robust enough to address extended recovery that may require
utilization of new facilities, relocation of staff and involvement of outside
personnel.
-
Review and reassign responsibilities at least
monthly. Factor in changes to your organization caused by recent
layoffs and restructurings. Assign new responsibilities to employees based on
the current organizational structure and available resources. Test this
updated plan to ensure all tools and protocols are in place to operate during
a disaster, reaching out to all parts of the organization and employee family
members as well as vendors, government agencies and emergency responders.
-
Update your notification system at least
monthly. Critical during any potential interruption, notification
should be an integral part of an organizationÂ’s disaster recovery plan. Make
sure all contact numbers are up-to-date, allowing the organization to get in
touch with key personnel in the event of an emergency. This will also help
prioritize methods of communication and track which employees have received
messages.
-
Know where staff will work if you lose your
facility. Employees are the heart of an organization; however, many
human resources aspects are frequently overlooked in disaster recovery
planning. Businesses must identify alternate locations where employees can go
in the event a primary work location is unavailable and address the physical
safety and psychological well-being of employees. Assign backup roles for the
inevitable times when key players are not available or missing, and
time-sensitive actions need to be taken. Employ cross training to have
alternative contacts ready to go.
-
If a Disaster is DECLARED EXECUTE your plan. If
an organization has access to hot or cold back-up sites, a common mistake is
to wait too long before declaring an emergency and relocating personnel. If an
organization is located in an area for which a government evacuation order has
been issued, it should declare and relocate immediately.
-
Document your technology infrastructure. Develop
procedures for technical recovery scripts that will be deployed to help get
your IT infrastructure up and running. Make the scripts comprehensive and easy
to understand so people who are not familiar with them can easily follow
along.
-
Update your vendor list at least monthly.
Strictly enforce change management and control processes to help ensure vendor
contacts are current so vital services will be quickly available when needed.
-
Review the use of contractors and outsourced
facilities. In the event of a disaster, will your vendors be able to
perform their roles in supporting your critical technical infrastructure and
business processes? Consider looking at secondary providers as a precaution.
Take time to evaluate whether support or maintenance contracts need to be
extended or have levels of support modified.
-
Review and test readiness and completeness of offsite
data storage. Paper records and backup tapes may be totally lost,
destroyed or unavailable. Develop contingencies in the event delivery of
offsite-stored data is delayed. Investigate using electronic media - through
disk-to-disk backup - to help safeguard and provide backup information.
-
Have a current plan in place to re-build your critical
servers. Should a disaster occur, re-building servers from the ground
up consumes time and stretches internal IT resources. Consider working with a
third-party provider that can simplify these processes by rebuilding your
operating systems on its own servers - enabling a speedy and more
cost-effective recovery.
Disaster Planning Protects Assets
Disaster
planning is an essential component of preserving your enterpriseÂ’s assets. With
a written disaster plan, your enterprise can reduce the risk of disaster and
minimize losses. The Janco Disaster
Recovery Plan Template is perfect for small and medium-sized institutions
that do not have in-house preservation staff. The Janco Disaster Recovery Plan Template
is also valuable for large enterprises that need to develop separate but related
plans for multiple buildings, locations, or branches.
The Janco Disaster Recovery Plan Template
can help you create a plan for disaster prevention and response. Enter data
into the online template to create a customized disaster plan for your
enterprise. This plan will help you:
-
Prevent
or mitigate disasters,
-
Prepare
for the most likely emergencies,
-
Respond
quickly to minimize damage if disaster strikes, and
-
Recover
effectively from disaster while continuing to provide enterprise services to
your customers and clients
Causes of Disasters
According to Janco Associates, the primary factor
in the activiation of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans is
computer hardware failure.
Email Outages Average Almost 1 Hour Per Month
A recent Osterman Research survey found that in mid-sized
and large organizations, e-mail systems experience a mean of 53 minutes of unplanned downtime
during a typical month. That means that during a one-year period, a typical
e-mail system will be down for 10.6 hours. This does not include the scheduled
maintenance or other scheduled outages that happen on a regular basis. A company
considering e-mail recovery or continuity needs to understand the importance of
e-mail and its tolerance for e-mail outages. Decision makers need to understand
exactly what impact an e-mail outage can have on their business, although many
of them do not understand the full impact of an
outage.
Pandemics Need to be Accounted for in Business Continuity and Disaster Plans
When the
World Health Organization (WHO) raises the pandemic threat alert to Level 6 what
affect does that have on business continuity? Enterprises will have to do more than
tell sick employees to stay home and healthy ones to wash their
hands.
When a
pandemic strikes your enterprise the business continuity and disaster recovery
plans need to allow IT workers to manage computer systems from home. There is no other alternative but to have
them in the office.
A Level
6 alert means that company officials will be asked by the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention to undertake a number of efforts to fight any
pandemic -- including the appointment of a workplace Pandemic Coordinator or
team.
The
Pandemic Coordinator is responsible for monitoring employees to ensure they
follow basic rules of hygiene, such as washing hands, and to make sure that
breathing masks are available. If a worker becomes sick, the Pandemic Coordinator must
ensure they go home.
The real
issue is not sick employees, but an inability to get supplies and
deliveries.
If your
enterprise is in a locality that gets to pandemic levels of infection your
enterprise is going to see issues like suppliers not being able to get
deliveries to you because they are sick. This will be a regional issue, even if
your organization is not directly affected by the flu.
How does consolication impact Disaster Planning
In an effort to drive profitability and rein in costs,
businesses are continually seeking to improve operational capabilities. Primary
to this objective are today's burgeoning network infrastructures, which are
continually being asked to do more. Applications are becoming more sophisticated
and mission-critical. More software is written to take advantage of dynamic IP
parameters. In addition, an economic slowdown has companies relying on
network-based technologies that reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and save
money. Consolidation is another trend bolstering IT efficiencies. Servers and storage are often the
first affected by a consolidation initiative. However, data center consolidation
is just as important in terms of optimizing infrastructure security, compliance
and integrity. The flourishing area of unified communications (UC) offers
further testimony to the increased significance of the network. UC provides
substantial benefit to the enterprise in terms of capabilities that allow staff
to collaborate in real time, access critical information and communicate
seamlessly with coworkers and customers -- regardless of
location.
Remote and Branch Office Disaster Planning
Distributed data at Remote and Branch Offices (ROBO) continues to
grow substantially year after year. Leaving this data unprotected or
inadequately protected poses serious business risks for organizations.
Protection approaches require careful consideration as factors such as technical
complexity, capital and operational costs, and expertise of personnel must be
taken into account.
Local disk-based data protection strategies improve
backup efficiency and reliability over tape-based ones. Consolidation of edge
data to the core data center may introduce further efficiencies. Data
de-duplication can drive both backup-to-disk and consolidation adoption.
Business Risk makes Disaster Planning More Complex
Whether you
are a for profit business, a bank, a government agency, hospital the risk of
compromising private information is very high. Business relies heavily on
technology today and business risk often is technology dependent. The
possibility of litigation is part of business. There has always been a risk in
doing business, but because technology and today's business are so intertwined,
business risk has a
higher threat level. This has prompted many to encrypt workstations and mobile
computers in order to protect critical business data.
If you have
rolled out encryption,
how do you maintain your IT service quality when the hard disk drive fails? How
do you plan and prepare for a data loss when the userÂ’s computer is
encrypted? These are all issues that should be considered when putting
together a data disaster plan. In addition, data recovery, one of the more
common missing elements of a disaster recovery plan, should also be factored in
because it can serve as the “Hail Mary” attempt when all other options have been
exhausted.
Backing up with an Outsource Provider may not be the Right Answer
Just because your disaster recovery business
continuity plan includes a plan
for backing up your data
to a outsource provider does
not mean that your enterprise is safe.
Carbonite, EMC's Mozy, and Amazon's
Simple Storage Service (S3) are providers in the growing online backup market.
The services let consumers and enterprises back up their data over the Internet
for later retrieval if a hard drive or another component should fail. Carbonite
targets its service toward home and small-business users.
Carbonite is suing storage vendor
Promise Technology, saying repeated failures of Promise gear have caused
"significant data loss" at Carbonite.
In the lawsuit, Carbonite said it
bought more than $3 million (US Dollars) worth of Promise VTrak Raid products
beginning in 2006. In several incidents starting in January 2007, the service
provider suffered data loss because the Promise gear failed to support recovery
from physical drive errors and array errors. The data losses caused "substantial
damage" to Carbonite's business, the company alleged.
