Test, test, test. Any disaster recovery plan worth its salt must be tested, and any shortcomings revealed by the test must be rectified. That’s how we make DR plans that are robust, relevant, and effective – as long as the configurations of IT systems remain reasonably stable. However, configuration drift is a fact of IT life. Read more
There are four ways of handling a risk, such as the failure of one of your IT systems. The first is to accept it, for example, if it is a non-critical system that you can fix next week. The second is to eliminate it, using mirrored systems and storage in a hot standby scenario. Read more
Are you a hoarder? Do you compulsively hang onto things that have ceased to be useful or valid, perhaps because they might still serve some purpose? Data hoarding is all about stashing away all that “stuff” that your IT systems accumulate, just in case it comes in useful in the future. Read more
Ever since Marc Andreessen declared that software is eating the world, IT’s appetite for transforming the physical into the virtual has carried on unabated. The Internet has created massive amounts of new business. Read more
Documents for your disaster recovery management can have a double importance. The first, naturally, is to hold details of how to react if disaster strikes. The DR plan must be clear, practical, effective, tested and available to those who need to put it into action. The second on the other hand is often overlooked. It is the importance of being able to prove, after a disaster has occurred, that your organisation took reasonable steps to put DR procedures and resources in place. A disaster recovery often does not end when IT systems are up and running again. There may be legal and reputational repercussions to deal with as well. Read more
In law courts around the world, the golden rule is “innocent until proven guilty”. For many aspects of IT systems, a similar concept applies too. For example, you can see that you have enough data storage capacity, by comparing with the gigabytes or terabytes you’ve used with the space still available on your storage network. You can show a system is capable of handling a certain workload or reaching a given performance level by running that workload and measuring the results. You can even prove business continuity. If your systems are still running, you have business continuity! However, when it comes to other areas, notably disaster recovery, “guilty until proven innocent” may be a safer way to proceed. Read more
As systems and technologies become more and more complicated, they also become more vulnerable to failure. It may big or it may be little, but when you have 100 moving parts where before you only had 10, your chance of breakdown is likely to increase. On the other hand, some technologies aim specifically to prevent such failure. Others, by good fortune, have resistance to failure built in. IT applications for example can now run in the cloud, where virtualisation and data replication increases overall reliability and resilience dramatically. “Phew”, you say to yourself, “at last technology that won’t put my business at risk”. Unfortunately, there is an even bigger risk that technology cannot help you with. Read more
No disaster recovery plan is perfect. However, there is a big difference between knowing about and managing limitations; and being caught wrong-footed by a problem you never thought about. Some items seem to consistently make the ‘hit parade’ of omissions and absences in DR plans. Before spilling the beans, here’s a hint to help you guess what they might be. They each involve a lack of vision beyond the limited point of view of IT servers and applications in a data centre. Read more
While the term ‘disaster recovery planning’ often conjures up images of servers in racks, disk drives and IT personnel monitoring system consoles, it takes more than that to keep today’s IT systems going. Power, air-conditioning, networks and the buildings that house IT systems are all part of the infrastructure required for IT operations. Any damage or unavailability of these items can quickly result in overall IT outage. But that’s not all. A really effective DR plan must prepare a business for handling not only hardware requirements, but also those for software and people as well. Read more
Disaster recovery is a term that originated in IT, referring to recovery of computer and network systems after serious interruption of operations or damage. However, from an overall business point of view it would be foolhardy to ignore the further reaching effects of IT incidents; and to what extent DR planning and management contain or exacerbate these effects. One of the major risks that accompanies IT disasters is reputational damage – especially when the IT systems directly concern an organization’s customers or constituents. How much do DR metrics like recovery time objective (RTO) take reputational damage into consideration? Read more