Posts Tagged ‘drp’

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…)

Business Continuity Planning – More Than Just Disaster Recovery

Monday, February 14th, 2011

The 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.

Click here to read the full article

Business Continuity Planning for Small to Medium Enterprise

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Consider the scenario of losing your primary premises due to fire. Can you answer these questions?

- How much revenue would you lose being out of action for a day, a week or a month?
- Have you got an alternate location to operate your business from?
- Is your data regularly sent off site and ready to be restored into backup systems?
- What are your critical paper records and how do you continue to operate if they were destroyed?

Every business, regardless of its size, should be confident in the answers to these questions and should be making an informed choice about the cost of implementing business continuity strategies and IT disaster recovery solutions versus the risk\cost of not doing anything.

Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) often don’t have the budget or resources to spend months implementing a business continuity project. But SME’s still have a need for BCP, just as much as bigger organisations. Quite often all of the physical resources, especially IT equipment are concentrated in the one location which can increase the risk. Sometimes without dedicated IT staff, the backup and restoration practices may not be sufficient to help them recover from a loss of premises type incident.

At OpsCentre we’ve refined the art of the ‘Quick Start’ BCP and can deliver a business continuity plan for suitable small to medium enterprises within 1-2 weeks. If your organization needs assistance with getting a business continuity plan in place we can help. Contact us and let us know what you need.

Business Continuity Terminology – What’s the difference between MTO, RTO and RPO?

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

A common query that we come across in business continuity consulting is, ‘what is the difference between MTO, RTO and RPO?’

MTO is the Maximum Tolerable Outage
The Maximum Tolerable Outage for a critical business process represents the maximum amount of time that an organization can survive without the business process in any form (manual or automated). Defining the MTO for a process gives you the deadline for when this process must be up and running in some form or another. 

The BCI describes MTO as ‘At what point in time do you need to either recover your business process, or invoke contingency procedures to prevent you from meeting your business objectives\targets.’

RTO is Recovery Time Objective
Recovery Time Objective is essentially the timeframe requirement for how long it should take to recover from the time of declaring the disaster (not the time of the actual incident) to when the critical process or system is available to users.

RPO is the Recovery Point Objective
The Recovery Point Objective  describes the age of the data you want to restore in the event of a disaster. For example if your RPO is 6 hours, you want to restore systems back to the state they were in no longer than 6 hours ago. This dictates your backup requirements, in this example you must be making data backups at least every 6 hours. Any data created up to the 6 hour RPO will be lost and will need to be recreated during your recovery process (if possible).

What is the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning?

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Persons new to recovery planning often find it difficult to differentiate between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. In its simplest form, Business Continuity differs from Disaster Recovery in that its focus is on people and the continuation of business processes and objectives rather than the availability of IT systems and infrastructure.

Business Continuity Planning deals with taking pro-active measures to ensure continuity of business as well as plans to manage the response and recovery from a business interruption. The Business Continuity Plan would include a plan for the Command Team who will co-ordinate and oversee the response as well as sub-plans for the business units.

The IT Disaster Recovery Plan supports the recovery effort by detailing the IT system recovery priorities and time constraints, plans and strategies for recovery as well as detailed restoration procedures. The priorities and time constraints need to be driven from the business continuity requirements identified in the business impact analysis.

Of vital importance is getting Business Continuity Plans and IT Disaster Recovery Plans to dovetail in and work together to support one another in a recovery effort.

Need help integrating the pieces of the puzzle? Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Consulting