Live Disaster Recovery News
New Disaster Recovery Audit Program Released
The Disaster Recovery / Business
Continuity Audit program identifies control objectives that are meet by the
audit program.
There are 36 specific items that the audit covers in the 11 page
audit program. Included are references to specific Janco products that
directly address the areas the audit covers.
This program can be used as standalone audit program or in concert with
the following Janco offerings:
Centralized Back-up for DRP is an Issue
The need to be close to customers, manufacturing
facilities and specialized labor have required organizations to extend the
traditional concept of headquarters to offices and factories hundreds or even
thousands of miles away. However, along with the opportunities that come with
workforce globalization, come the realities of dealing with data that sprawls
across the organization. Whether the data is at the Munich branch or at HQ in
New York, it is equally susceptible to loss, requiring that data recovery and
security plans apply to all parts of the organization, regardless of location.
To protect company data and ensure its availability to users, IT
organizations have been conflicted between two backup approaches. The first
approach, local tape backup, requires that tape libraries be present wherever
there are servers in racks. Local area network (LAN) access to the servers gives
administrators fast data backup and recovery.
The newer approach, centralized backup, puts
high-density tape libraries in one location to which data from servers around
the world is backed up. While centralized backup requires less hardware, reduces
administration time, and solves the security problem associated with loose tape
media, it can introduce greater bandwidth consumption and longer backup/restore
windows. Because of these issues, centralized backup has been a leap some
managers have not been willing to make.
Back-up e-mail system should be part of your DRP
Enterprise are now realizing that separate
archiving processes for disaster recovery and for general
archiving that is need for enterprise compliance to Sarbanes Oxley and
operation needs are wasteful and unnecessary. The Janco Disaster Recovery
Plan and Security Manual Template show their clients how to do this cost
effectively. The templates begin
with an assessment of what is done and maps that to what needs to be done.
In addition a backup
e-mail system in needed. The system
should be with a managed service provider who hosts the servers offsite out of
the client's immediate geography. Archiving and disaster recovery are both
extremely complex, combining the two so that there is one set of systems,
policies and data decreases cost and management complexity.
Explosive Growth is a Challenge Faced by Disaster Recovery Planning Processes
Enterprises of all sizes today are facing the
ever-increasing challenge of managing the explosive growth of valuable data. As
the predominant form of communication for business transactions, email is an
application that is mission critical to organizations of all sizes. It generates
a huge amount of information that must be immediately available and protected.
The loss of a single message may generate hours of unnecessary and frustrating
labor for administrators and can lower productivity or even hinder progress
within organizations.
Email
applications have become key communication tools for businesses of all sizes.
Today, email is the most common and vital form of communication, often replacing
the phone as the preferred mechanism for exchanging information in the business
world. It is a more efficient and cost-effective way of disseminating
information of all types (text, image, video, and even voice) to fellow
employees and between companies located anywhere in the world. In fact, as
companies consider their messaging servers to be mission critical, these are
among the first servers to be recovered after a disaster, sometimes even before
phone systems.
Cell Phones Key to Disaster Recovery Plan
The first hours after a natural disaster are a crucial period for
the any enterprises efforts to implement the plan. Even when phone and power
service is unavailable, the organization's field staff stays connected to vital
information with their cell phones and smartphones. They use the
cellular network to send and receive emails and instant messages, keep their
calendars and contacts up-to-date, review documents, and place and accept phone
calls.
Server consolidation increases complexity and adds risk to Disaster Planning
Disaster plan need to take into account mainframes, blade
servers, consolidated file 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, Server consolidation in
recent years has proven to be a successful technique to optimize IT costs and
efficiency, while increasing business uptime.
This has raised the level of complexity and risk associated with DRP
and business continuity plans. For example, in 2004 alone, over 65 percent of
all IT organizations implemented or planned to implement server consolidation.
Today, with the advent of blade server architectures, virtual server technology,
and storage deployment methods such as clustering and virtualization, the
expansion of the already proven benefits of consolidation are accelerating.
Appropriately Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity need to be
updated.
