Small and medium businesses often rely on being nimble enough in the market to compete with big businesses. A “disaster recovery plan template for SMBs” would ideally take that into account, covering all the different aspects of such businesses, while remaining concise enough to facilitate updates as business configurations change with market conditions. The trouble is that templates as generally applicable are unlikely to both effective and efficient at the same time. Perhaps the following “3P principle” could help put you put your own more manageable template in place.
Archive for the ‘Disaster Recovery’ Category
SMB Disaster Recovery Plan Templates and the 3P Principle
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012The Danger Of Disaster Recovery Overkill
Monday, December 12th, 2011In theory, disaster recovery like its counterpart business continuity needs to concentrate on what is critical in an organisation to keep it functioning correctly, and concentrate on planning for and managing those aspects. Experience plays a large part in understanding how far to go, and having broad knowledge gained by working in or with the various operations of a company can be invaluable. Otherwise plans can become too elaborate and too costly compared to the general level of business risk that applies to an organisation. Yet, how much disaster recovery is too much?
Disaster recovery template mania?
Monday, November 28th, 2011A disaster recovery template has its uses. If you’re stuck for ideas about how to lay out your DR plan or if you need a quick-fix solution until you can revisit it in depth, a template that covers the main points can be a boon. It’ll probably be generic, because templates have to be usable by different types of organisation. For that reason, it won’t necessarily provide answers about any specific aspects of your business, although it can help you to uncover them by asking you suitably worded questions. So it’s when DR templates start to become overly specific that a doubt may creep in. (more…)
Business Continuity Management indicators – leading or lagging?
Thursday, November 24th, 2011In business continuity management, you need to know how well you’re doing. In fact both BCM and disaster recovery need their indicators, just like the rest of the management sectors, whether for finance, production, logistics or any other domain. In a world where KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a watchword, and the accepted rule is “what gets measured, gets managed”, it’s clear that the right measurements can help in effective management. However, if BCM is designed to keep things running, whereas DR is destined to be applied when they stop running, do they necessarily need the same type of indicators? (more…)
Alternatives to tape back-up
Monday, November 14th, 2011Although tape still has advantages for high volume data back-up, not every organisation is properly equipped or structured to exploit those advantages. Small and medium businesses in particular may want alternatives to tape back-up if their IT department would rather put its resources, whether money or staff, into other projects than the management of an elaborate tape back-up solution. Any alternative needs to be competitive in terms of back-up capacity, cost and security. After all, the other aspect of interest for tape back-ups is the relative ease of removing tape cartridges to a separate location for archiving, providing security against incidents affecting the main data centre. There are however solutions that compete for as little as $50 or $60 per year.
Disaster Recovery and Interdependency
Monday, November 7th, 2011Ever since the second computer was attached to the first network, interdependency has grown. Servers depend on each other to provide vital services and applications are distributed over machines. Disaster recovery is not just a question of recovering a database, when servers also need name and directory services to find each other again across a network. The trap is to apply disaster recovery to the different IT components in isolation and to define aggressive recovery time objectives that fail to take into account the linkages between the components needed to make the whole system work. Already a puzzle for the IT department, interdependency is a challenge for other parts of the business too. (more…)
Disaster recovery and the domino effect
Monday, October 17th, 2011The emphasis in recent times in BC/DR planning has been on getting rid of the “silo” effect – the blinkered thinking that only takes into account one department at a time. By recognising that isolated business risk does not exist, enterprises have made progress in adapting their disaster recovery planning for company-wide coverage, with less and less of the fiefdom mentality. What is less clear is the degree to which organisations have also thought about the “domino” effect; instead of one risk with simultaneous multiple impacts, the domino effect concerns a risk with a particular impact that exposes another part of the organisation to a second risk and impact, leading to a third and so on.
Employee and Personal Impacts of a Disaster
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011Although recovering servers and IT applications is an important part of disaster recovery and business continuity planning, it’s also important to take into account the impact on employees of a disaster. A company’s systems may be vital if employees are to be able to work, but employees are also how a company communicates and continues to do business with its customers and suppliers.
Offsite Backup Tape Archiving for Disaster Recovery
Monday, September 26th, 2011If tape backup is an essential component of your disaster recovery strategy, then offsite tape archiving will often be as well. One of the classic tape backup risks is leaving the tapes onsite, where any disaster that wipes out your systems will do the same to your tapes. Basic disaster recovery strategy dictates that tapes need to be stored in a physically separate location. In that case, who is responsible for transporting them offsite; how are they stored in the offsite archive; who will bring them back onsite if disaster strikes, and how quickly? (more…)
Validating your data backup plan
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011Having a plan for data backup as part of your disaster recovery strategy is the right thing to do, but it’s not the end of the story. Too many organisations have planned their data backups, only to find in situations of emergency that the backups were unavailable or insufficient. The reasons can be varied, but the risk remains: data that are not stored safely, correctly or completely may be no better than data that are not stored at all. (more…)
Preparing for an exceptional event that happens every year
Monday, September 19th, 2011If the city where your business runs is hosting the Olympic Games or similar, then you’ll be facing a one-off exceptional event. As such, you may need to take exceptional measures in order to ensure business continuity. For events of this magnitude, organisers or municipal agencies often produce continuity guidelines to help avoid the worst and maintain business continuity. (more…)
Tape or Disk Backups? – Why not do Both?
Monday, September 12th, 2011
Discussions about whether to go for disk or tape as a back-up medium are frequent, but there’s still no knock-out result one way or the other. To reach any conclusion, you need to know the advantages
of tape backup in disaster recovery, and how to sidestep any tape backup risks. In many instances, the pros of tape are the cons of disk, and vice versa. Small wonder therefore that they can complement each other for a reliable, cost-effective solution. Is a balanced combination of both disk and tape then better than using either one exclusively? (more…)
Is your Disaster Recovery plan up to scratch?
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011In this searchcio.com article, Anthony Caruana highlights a recent IDC study which found that only one third (1/3) of the orgianisations surveyed could recovery more than half of their systems in real time. Worse still, only one in nine (9) believed they could restore any systems in realtime.
Anthony then provides eight tips for designing an effective disaster recovery plan.
News feature: Risky business
Friday, April 8th, 2011Awareness is growing around the importance of risk management, and IT’s involvement in ensuring compliance. A special ARN report.
Risk management should be high on the list of priorities right now. If organisations and boards didn’t realise its importance previously, the natural disasters of Queensland, Victoria, Perth, Christchurch, Japan, and, most recently, Myanmar (it’s been a bad start to the year) should have reinforced it.
Then there’s the other, less physical disasters that can hit organisations. RSA security gets broken through, Anonymous effectively pulls Visa and MasterCard offline. Locally, Virgin runs into a PR disaster when its customers struggle with its systems.
Cloud Computing – “Too Much Redundancy Is A Myth”
Monday, April 4th, 2011Michael Jenkin from Business Technology Partners, posted an Article in ARN on the 22nd March; discussing redundancy in the IT world.
What an interesting article. This will get you thinking about Cloud Computing solutions for your business. Have you dotted your ‘I’s’ and crossed your ‘T’s’. Have you opted for the cheaper option? Have you missed something?
“Truly, you can never have too much redundancy. You can allow for everything that can possibly go wrong, still something will be left out of your risk analysis and come at you from an unexpected angle.” Michael Jenkin, Too much redundancy is a myth, ARN 22nd March.
Click here to see the full article.