“Learn from your mistakes” is a good motto and business continuity plans are no exception. In the previous post, “Disaster Recovery Plan – the Map is Not the Territory”, we described how ASCDI (Association of Service and Computer Dealers International) found out that in a hurricane its disaster recovery plan was less than perfect. The experience is described by Joseph Marion on the ASCDI website as “humbling”. However, it’s also thanks to honest accounts like this that BC planning continues to develop and that other organisations get the chance to avoid similar pitfalls. Some of the practical lessons learned by ASCDI are below.
Posts Tagged ‘Disaster Recovery’
Business Continuity Plans and Lessons Learned
Monday, January 23rd, 2012The Difference Between Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity
Monday, December 12th, 2011The difference between DR and BC often depends on the person you’re talking to. It’s one of those grey areas, where definitions are sometimes arbitrary and no universal standard definition exists. The two terms not only evoke different meanings, but provoke different reactions in organisational management. Disaster recovery may be largely ignored because “disaster” is such an extreme and improbable concept. Business continuity is easier to grapple with its suggestion of different degrees of keeping your business going: anything from upgrading a server, to replacing a key VP on maternity leave, to handling an impending hurricane. Yet, there’s a least one simple way to resolve the matter.
Where Does Emergency Management Stop And Business Continuity Start?
Monday, December 12th, 2011Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your planning… We discussed the relationship between disaster recovery and business continuity in another post, but this time the subject is the dividing line between emergency management and business continuity. In fact, we’re back to the same question: how do you carve up everything that needs to be planned, tested and executed in order for an organisation to “keep a lickin’ and keep on tickin’” (one of our favourite quotes!). Moreover, from this question comes another one that is just as important.
The 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?
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…)
Virtualisation and Disaster Recovery
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011Virtualisation 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. (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…)
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.
OpsCentre Round Table Event – Cloud Computing: Risky Business?
Thursday, March 17th, 2011OpsCentre is hosting another Round Table event at the Vibe Hotel in Sydney on 28th April 2011 to discuss Cloud Computing Risks.
Details have been updated on OpsCentre’s Events page and there is a link through to more information and registration.
Business Continuity Planning – More Than Just Disaster Recovery
Monday, February 14th, 2011The disasters in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia have put BCP into sharp focus.
In this article, Allan Davies provides advice he gleaned the hard way from working through numerous disasters, and suggests that CIO’s need to think in broader terms than just IT disaster recovery. He outlines nine valuable lessons that should be incorporated into everyones disaster recovery plan.