News
October 19th, 2011
Virtualisation may not have all the answers when it comes to disaster recovery, but it can do things that basic tape or online back-ups cannot. It makes it easier to accomplish the three mandatory parts of a successful recovery: restoration of the data, the application using the data and the operating system required to make the application work. Tape or online back-ups may give you your data back, but if the servers have gone, then applications need to be installed all over again – and so do the operating systems with their passwords, permissions and configuration specific to the company concerned. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Disaster Recovery, Virtual Machines, Virtualisation, VMWare
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October 19th, 2011
The National Emergency Communications Plan drawn up by the US Government in 2008 makes interesting reading. In its introductory section, it states that “during the last three decades, the nation has witnessed how inadequate emergency communications capabilities can adversely affect response and recovery efforts”.
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Tags: Business Continuity, Business Continuity Exercising, Telecommunications
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October 17th, 2011
The 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.
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Tags: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery
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October 11th, 2011
Even businesses that compete in the same market may be very different in structure and operations. For a generic approach, business continuity best practice is available in any number of books or training courses, but best practice for the detail of what goes into your plan may be harder to come by.
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Tags: Business Continuity Plan, business continuity plan best practice
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October 10th, 2011
If the air conditioning breaks down in a hospital administration department in the height of summer, productivity starts to drop as the temperature rises. It becomes harder to stay focused on the task at hand, people get crabbier on the telephone with patients and suppliers and the “go the extra mile” motivation your organisation normally prides itself on wanes significantly. Maximum tolerable outage? A day or so, perhaps. On the other hand if the air conditioning stops functioning in your data centre, then your servers may stop functioning too. Maximum tolerable outage? For vital medical systems, perhaps one minute – if that. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity, Maximum Tolerable Outage, MTO, Recovery Time Objective, RTO
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October 8th, 2011
Business continuity test scenarios are an integral part of good Business Continuity planning, on two conditions: they test for the right things; and that they are realistic in how they test. It’s important to keep the end goal in mind. A simple definition of business continuity can be helpful here, such as the one from the US Department of Homeland Security – “the ability of an organisation to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’”. A good test scenario therefore has to mirror a situation where an organisation is under real pressure or in a real crisis, rather than just running your finger down a checklist of “if this, then that” line items. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity Planning, Business Continuity Test Scenarios, Business Continuity Testing, Pull The Plug Test
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October 4th, 2011
Although 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.
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Tags: Business Continuity, Business Continuity Planning, Disaster Recovery, employee impacts
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September 28th, 2011
What makes small businesses different to bigger ones when it comes to business continuity? Common risks for small businesses are linked to their operations being confined to one specific sector and one geographical location. They don’t have the possibilities of mitigation available to larger, more diverse, distributed companies. Disaster can strike all of their resources at once. Accordingly, larger customers often scrutinise their small company suppliers to see whether they have an effective business continuity strategy in place. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity, Business Continuity for Small Business, Business Continuity Plan, Business Impact Analysis, Common Risks for Small Business, Small Business, SME Business Continuity
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September 26th, 2011
If 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? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Disaster Recovery, Maximum Tolerable Outage, MTO, Offsite Tape Archiving, Tape Backup
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September 21st, 2011
Having 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Data Backup, disaster recovery plan, Disk Backup, exercising, Tape Backup, Testing, Validation
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September 19th, 2011
If 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity
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September 16th, 2011
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sure, people in an organisation want business to go on successfully. Their jobs, families and futures depend on it. If you ask them what would happen if systems suddenly crashed, if access to their workspace was blocked, they’ll probably agree it would be a disaster.
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Tags: Business Continuity Management, Business Continuity Plans
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September 14th, 2011
The discussions about cloud computing and business continuity are reminiscent of similar ones a few years back about the use of software as a service (SaaS). The similarities are all the more striking following the recent outages of certain well-known cloud computing services and the questions raised about the viability of cloud computing for strategically sensitive or critical computing requirements. Like SaaS, cloud computing is hailed by some as “next practice” and beyond just “best practice”. On the other hand, unlike SaaS, cloud computing for business continuity may provide more flexibility in that it allows for dynamic redistribution of computing activity. As far as SaaS goes, you either run your application in-house or you pay an SaaS provider to run it for you, but you probably wouldn’t do both just to be able to switch between the two at the very moment any problems start. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity, Cloud Computing
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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? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Data Backup, Disk Backup, drp, IT Disaster Recovery, Tape Backup
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September 10th, 2011
Good business continuity continues to be both a learning and a problem-solving process. While the Business Continuity Management industry has its own experts who work on the problems and solutions on a daily basis, continuing to be open-minded about input from outside the industry can also be rewarding. For OpsCentre, our participation in the University of Wollongong Univative Program was first and foremost a way to help build and develop a positive community. What we also found was that putting strategic business questions to a group of bright, enthusiastic people unfettered by conventional business ideas can lead to both innovative and practical ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity, Careers Central, Strategy, Univative, University, University of Wollongong
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