In the past, computer systems were massive and made to last. The hardware cost more than the software, and while various processor, RAM, and hard drive upgrades happened from time to time, organisations never junked their investments; they amortised them. Read more
Have you ever considered what happens when essential systems for which no backup is possible then stop working? Read more
From afterthought to preconception, many aspects of IT are now being designed into systems and networks at the earliest possible stage, i.e. when the first specification documents are drawn up. Code testing, performance, and security can all be part of the spec and developed and enhanced together with the application functionality. Sure, reliability and availability are usually part of the design and the project goals too, but the case is now strong for making disaster recovery part of the IT solution DNA as well. Read more
How can organisations plan IT disaster recovery for the 20 billion devices forecast to be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), and ranging over anything from lawn sprinkler systems to railway locomotives? The consequences of failure or operational degradation can be very different, but the underlying principles are often similar. The device, whatever it is, needs to receive instructions, and send back information to help avoid problems and optimise performance. In the first place, this activity happens over the Net as a dialogue with central servers. However, appropriate DR planning for IoT devices can help take these links out of the equation. Read more
Bring your own device or BYOD exists practically everywhere, whether your enterprise has a policy for it or not. Any employee with a personal smartphone can and frequently does store some business-related data on it. The ideas behind deliberately encouraging BYOD are often cost reduction (employees fund their devices, rather than looking to the enterprise) and increased flexibility for employees in the way they work. Read more
Big data is all around us and getting bigger by the minute. As enterprises and organizations, we produce big data ourselves through internal system logs, online sales sites, and “digital exhaust” of different kinds, although our individual output is only a drop in the ocean compared to all the big data out there. Read more
From time to time, we forget about things, or they become so familiar that we stop paying attention to them. We only notice when they’re gone, like a building that has just been demolished. This happens with disaster recovery too. Read more
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
Computers are as old as the hills, when you consider early technologies like the abacus. Short of picking an abacus up and shaking it, it must have been hard to make it crash. When the first gigantic computers with their valves and switches arrived, so did the first crashes from bugs, which were literally the insects flying into the electricals and causing problems. Read more
The best laid plans of mice and men may not cover every eventuality in IT disaster recovery. The most you can expect, to paraphrase a saying about models, is that “all DR plans are bad, but some plans are useful” – “bad” simply because they can never precisely match the real-life conditions of a real IT disaster. Read more