Disaster Recovery Planning News

IT Salary Survey

Data is the latest available and shows trends in both compensation and hiring More...

IT Job Descriptions

The job descriptions contained within the Internet and Information Technology Position Descriptions HandiGuide® are all in a standard format and are available as in PDF, WORD 2003, and WORD 2007 formats. All of the job descriptions were review and update to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and the ISO 27000 security standard. More...

Disaster Recovery Planning News

Disaster 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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DRP and Security Plans key to compliance

Preparing for a disaster requires detailed planning, preparation and testing. Knowing what IT assets need to be recovered, where to recover them and how to recover them are the essence of IT Disaster Recovery. The most difficult challenge is mapping the prioritized business requirements to the IT assets so that recovery can be staged. The recovery strategy then evolves based on the available options which support the required recovery objectives. The resulting Disaster Recovery plans contain all of the information detailing where to go, who is to do what and the information required to rebuild servers, restore applications and data as well as restart and synchronization procedures. more info

DRP Template

If you are new to recovery planning, make sure that you research the subject thoroughly before embarking on a disaster recovery project. Consider engaging a consultant (internal or external to your organization) to help you in your project planning effort. Disaster recovery planning is not a two-month project, neither is it a project that once completed, you can forget about. An effective recovery plan is a live recovery plan. The plan must be maintained current and tested/exercised regularly.

The primary objective of a Business Resumption Plan is to enable an organization to survive a disaster and to reestablish normal business operations. In order to survive, the organization must assure that critical operations can resume normal processing within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, the goals of the Business Resumption Plan should be to:

Identify weaknesses and implement a disaster prevention program;

minimize the duration of a serious disruption to business operations;

facilitate effective co-ordination of recovery tasks; and

reduce the complexity of the recovery effort.
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Why is diaster and business continuity planning important

Federal, State and Local Governments are chartered to mitigate and control the event, provide life and safety measures, and then restore infrastructures. The Red Cross provides emergency relief in the form of food, health and shelter. If insured, an insurance company will settle damage claims and provide monetary relief. However, none of these organizations will, or can, recover your business. Your companys recovery is strictly up to you, and it commences with a solid business continuity/disaster recovery plan.

Should your company experience a disaster, the first 72 hours following the incident will be the most critical in your recovery efforts. How you respond during that period will determine if your business will survive or not. Furthermore, the most important hour is the one immediately following the event. If ever required, your Business continuity plan will enable you to respond in a systematic and organized fashion. It will guide your organization, step-by-step, from responding to the actual event all the way through to full occupancy of your repaired facility.
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Simple Disaster Planning Activities

Creating a disaster recovery plan is a complex task; however there are a number of basic steps that you can follow to start thre process

Prepare your systems, processes, and people for an organized response to disaster when it strikes.

Identify critical IT systems and develop a long-range strategy.

Select and train your disaster recovery team.

Conduct a Business Impact Analysis.

Determine risks to your business from natural or human-made causes.

Get management support.

Create appropriate plan documents.

Test your plan.
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Disaster Plan & Business Continuity Infrastructure

The key technology elements of a Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan (DRP/BCP) infrastructure are the primary data center, a remote site that duplicates the resources in that primary location and the method used to get files (master and transaction) between the two sites - such as high-bandwidth network connections. The best DRP/BCP strategies follow a "redundant every-thing" philosophy throughout the data center. Multiple mainframes and servers should run in the production and backup data facilities. Then, if a component in the production system encounters problems, it immediately fails over to the local backup as a first line of defense.

Power supplies and communication links are one of the most critical components in a DRP/BCP strategy.

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White House email system down for a day

High tech White House falls down when its email disaster plan does not work.

The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced at a 1:45 p.m. press briefing that he was unable to send out the customary week-ahead memo as the White House e-mail system was "not working so well." D.C. reporters got their next e-mail from the White House around 8:30 the following morning indicating that the outage lasted most of a day.
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How to calculate the cost of downtime

One overlooked truth is that downtime costs accelerate in a non-linear fashion every hour. If a system fails for five minutes, the costs are fairly low because manual methods (paper and pencil) of making records or communicating by telephone instead of e-mails can suffice to conduct business. Over an extended period, however, the volume of work overwhelms the manual processes. Yet some businesses - such as Amazon or e-Bay - cannot run at all on manual processes. Business and financial operations increasingly deteriorate, and the rate of dollar losses grows - sometimes to the point of fatally damaging the business.

In addition, when assessing the financial impact of downtime, you need to consider factors such as potential lost revenue, reductions in worker productivity, and damaged market reputation. In some cases, downtime can even reduce shareholder confidence, which can create unnecessary and unplanned costs. Financial analysts and accountants at your company can help you come up with the factors at your company that are affected by downtime and contribute to its costs.
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Disaster Planning Considerations

Many enterprises have taken a segmented approach to Business Continuity and Availability, adding point technology and reactive services to address disaster recovery. This approach can be very complex, time-consuming and costly. The task becomes much easier when a single vendor takes responsibility for architecting, implementing, testing and supporting the solution.

There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, ESG research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications. Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime.1 In the past, this type of business demand was only consigned to a relatively small group. However, many more organizations of all sizes, in all industries and located across the globe, now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster. To make it more interesting, the number and types of applications that require this level of protection is very diverse.
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Many Businesses Fail After a Disaster

Businesses' reliance on IT systems and digital data has never been greater. The 2007 Best's Underwriting Guide found that only 6% of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive while 43% never reopen and 51% close within 2 years of the disaster. Best's Underwriting Guide 2007 also found that 93% of the companies that did not have their data backed up in the event of a disaster went out of business. An analysis of SMBs' prioritization of disaster recovery, backup and high availability for 2008 shows that businesses understand the risks to their business and the value of protection. However, many organizations still think that backup is a sufficient disaster recovery plan. However, mid-sized enterprises are at the most risk to disaster and are more likely to rely strictly on backup as a disaster recovery plan.

The needs and resources of mid-market firms are unique. Midsized companies must work with limited finances infrastructure and human resources. Robust disaster recovery used to be affordable and manageable only by large enterprises. Mid-sized enterprises relied more on backup than on a formal disaster recovery plan. As businesses' reliance on IT has grown, backup has increasingly shown its weaknesses. However, the introduction and maturation of several key technologies, such as virtualization, have brought affordable and easily implementable Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity to small and mid-sized companies. SMBs do not always equate virtualization with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity because awareness of the many virtualization applications is just starting to grow.
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