You know that you need to regularly and realistically test your disaster recovery plan. Without this testing, you’ll never know if the plan works – at least not until a disaster actually occurs, by which time it may be too late. 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
If you listed every single risk that could throw your organization into disaster recovery mode, you would be burning the midnight oil for a week. Mind you, you probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway from the worry of trying to figure out how on earth to deal with such risks. A better approach is to eliminate some of the worry. Read more
Once upon a time, the software code was the only thing that mattered. Everything else was added as an afterthought, including testing (of any description), integration, security, and considerations like IT disaster recovery. Now, enlightenment is slowly spreading through the coding community. It started with testing and integration. Read more
Rather like the progression of the primate to primitive human and thence to homo sapiens, some industry pundits are now pushing this latest development in the disaster recovery chain of evolution: IT service continuity management. Whether this new concept adds much value remains to be seen, but it has the merit of being simple. Read more
If your IT systems fail, break or go up in smoke, your IT sourcing strategy could determine how fast your business can recover. It’s worth considering the different options available when you renew or build out your IT installations. Read more
In theory, disaster recovery planning and management are what every self-respecting organization should practice. Restoring systems, databases, and networks – and more importantly, IT-enabled business functionality – after an incident is one of the highest priorities for most enterprises, so dependent on their IT to carry out their daily activities. The problem is that too many organizations do not know, in real terms, what they should be recovering. Read more
Sometimes it can be difficult to see the business forest for the IT trees. If you’ve ever pored over availability management as part of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices and wondered “why?”, here’s the answer. It’s to help prevent your enterprise from suffering catastrophic failure, a.k.a. going pear-shaped or going down the tubes. The specifications of IT availability must always be mapped onto business needs and vice versa. The following examples may help to see how. Read more
A branch office, by definition, is not a company’s headquarters. As all the really important data, information and systems are likely to be concentrated at headquarters, disaster recovery efforts are likely to be focused on that part of the company too. By comparison, branch offices are more tactical than strategic. 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