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Why has the demand for disaster recovery always existed? It’s because even though data is not accounted for on the balance sheet, data is valuable. And the value of data has risen exponentially, becoming the lifeblood of organizations. Disaster recovery is a key component in protecting the value of data as an asset for the business. In this post, I’ll discuss the historical problems behind disaster recovery and how it is now cost effective, simple and easy. Historically, the problem with disaster recovery was that it was just really difficult – expensive, complicated, and hard to achieve. The early replication technology could hardly accommodate the variety of hardware. Remember when every server had a dozen critical component drivers and two servers purchased only a few months apart had entirely different driver sets? Even if you managed to have a standard hardware platform with exactly the same configuration and firmware, you still had to find an identical set of hardware for a recovery site or you risked a (highly likely) failure during a crisis. The DR solutions were prohibitively expensive and rarely worked – certainly not at scale or with any order of complexity. Then along came virtualization with driver emulators, shared resources, and…
With the growing popularity of the cloud, more and more companies are turning to it for their production sites. But what about cloud-based disaster recovery? Does it offer the same kind of benefits? As disaster recovery can be complex, time-consuming and very expensive, it pays to plan ahead to figure out just what your business needs. Putting your disaster recovery plan in the cloud can help alleviate some of the fears that come with setting it up. Here are four big benefits to cloud-based disaster recovery: Faster recovery The big difference between cloud-based disaster recovery and traditional recovery practices is the difference in RPO and RTO. With cloud-based DR, your site has the capability to recover from a warm site right away, drastically reducing your RPO and RTO times from days, or even weeks, to hours. Whereas traditional disaster recovery involved booting up from a cold site, cloud recovery is different. Thanks to virtualization, the entire server, including the operating system, applications, patches and data are encapsulated into a single software bundle or virtual server. This virtual server can be copied or backed up to an offsite data center and spun up on a virtual host in a matter of minutes in…
Disaster recovery plans keep your business running A disaster recovery plan is important for many reasons, but in the world of business continuity, disaster recovery planning is a must-have component. There are several steps that need to be taken within a disaster recovery plan, including determining which systems are critical, what kind of recovery site is most beneficial for your business and determining what RPO/RTO your business can afford. But one of the most overlooked components of disaster recovery is testing your plan. When you have all of the elements, you must perform failover testing to make sure they work before a real emergency happens. So, what constitutes a successful failover test? What should you test? Testing is expensive and takes a lot of time and human resources, but it’s imperative to do it for the overall health of your business as well as comply with regulations such as HIPAA and PCI. A successful disaster recovery test can be the difference between a smooth or rocky failover when a real catastrophe takes place. Measuring success in a disaster recovery plan There’s more to testing than meets the eye. It’s extensive, and involves people, processes, communication and equipment recovery. Break that down…
In today’s faster-than-ever-paced world, it’s becoming more and more important for businesses to have all the technology they need at their fingertips in order to survive. In the event of a disaster especially, if organizations want to offset their losses, they need to be able to access and recover their data and infrastructure as quickly as possible. Continuous data protection can help with this. True continuous data protection (CDP) is real time replication of data as it is being written to disk. Each time a change is made, it is copied to a separate disk when that change is made. With continuous data protection, there is no interval of time between data replications. You can achieve minimal RPO and ensure the data at your recovery site is as up to date as possible with your production site. This type of replication is used with warm and hot site disaster recovery. There is also near CDP, where the same concept is applied using replication; however, it uses snapshots to recover to a certain point in time. This leaves the user unable to recover to ANY point in time he or she wishes. Near CDP has specific points of recovery that are much more frequent than traditional…
We’ve just launched our latest white paper on Disaster Recovery! This white paper is ideal for executives and IT decision-makers seeking a primer as well as up-to-date information regarding disaster recovery best practices and specific technology recommendations, including Disaster Recovery as a Service. Download the Disaster Recovery white paper. Read below for an excerpt about Disaster Recovery: We all know the importance of disaster recovery as it relates to business continuity and HIPAA compliance. However, there is a lot more to disaster recovery, and not all recovery options are created equal. Different kinds of disaster recovery are dependent on the needs of your business. In this post, we’ll talk about how the speed at which you need to recover your data and infrastructure affects your recovery site options and cost. When it comes to the speed of recovering your data, there are three different types of disaster recovery: cold, warm, and hot sites. Each describes the people and infrastructure required to get a backup site up and running as well as the time it takes to fully recover. Let’s use the analogy of driving a car. A cold site is as if you had a spare, bare-bones car parked in the garage…
Business continuity is a term that’s growing in popularity in risk management circles, but what does it mean exactly? The following is a list of common questions about business continuity and how it affects an organization and the people within it. What is business continuity? If we break down the word, continuity is defined by Merriam Webster as “the quality of something that does not stop or change as time passes: a continuous quality.” Business continuity takes that definition and applies it to the business world. Business continuity is the capability of your organization to continue to function as normal when faced with potentially disruptive incidents. How does business continuity affect me? Business continuity affects all levels of an organization, from the CEO down to the systems analyst. If something happens to interrupt your business, it can have devastating repercussions. If you’re a hospital and suffer a system failure, patients’ lives are literally at risk. If you run an e-business, any loss of ability to process financial transactions means a loss of revenue that could potentially put you out of business. Ultimately, the more revenue at risk per minute of disruption, the more your business is at risk to survive. How can I make sure my…
If the burgeoning economic renaissance in the city of Detroit is to fully take root, there’s some serious infrastructure work to be done. And not just “infrastructure” in terms of fixing the crumbling roads or creating mass transportation options, like the M1 Rail streetcar project. No, we’re talking technology infrastructure. A recent story at FiveThirtyEight.com highlighted some of the city’s technological marvels – such as fire stations rigging fax machines to knock over soda cans full of coins. That, folks, is Detroit’s emergency communication system. Really. Check it out for yourself. Want more? At city hall, more than 85 percent of computers are running Windows XP. Now, the city of Detroit’s economic issues have been making national news for quite some time. And while its internal IT turmoil doesn’t directly impact the success or failure of the growing number of tech startups sprouting up in and around the city, it is an indicator of just how behind-the-times the metropolitan area is in terms of technology. Online Tech co-CEO Yan Ness spoke of Metro Detroit’s immense potential when the company announced the opening of its 34,000-square-foot Metro Detroit Data Center. “Our new data center brings crucial technology infrastructure to a city…
Note: The following article is part of a shared content agreement between Online Tech and InfoSec Institute. (View original post.) For more information on IT disaster recovery, download disaster recovery white paper. BUSINESS CONTINUITY Within a business continuity plan exists a few steps: Business Impact Analysis (BIA) This involves determining the operational and financial impact of a potential disaster or disruption, including loss of sales, credibility, compliance fines, legal fees, PR management, etc. It also includes measuring the amount of financial/operational damage depending on the time of the year. A risk assessment should be conducted as part of the BIA to determine what kind of assets are actually at risk – including people, property, critical infrastructure, IT systems, etc.; as well as the probability and significance of possible hazards – including natural disasters, fires, mechanical problems, supply failure, cyber attacks; etc. Mapping out your business model and determining where the interdependencies lie between the different departments and vendors within your company is also part of the BIA. The larger the organization, the more challenging it will be to develop a successful business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Sometimes organizational restructuring and business process or workflow realignment is necessary not only…
September 2013 has been deemed National Preparedness Month (NPM) by President Barack Obama. The White House press release notes that FEMA intends to build and sustain national preparedness in the face of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes and floods to cyber incidents, like when hackers attacked major news outlets and federal agencies. While not every incident is predictable or preventable, organizations can create a comprehensive business continuity plan for their mission-critical data and application security. Within a business continuity plan lies four major steps: Business Impact Analysis (BIA) A BIA should include a risks assessment to determine what kind of assets are at risk – including people, property, critical infrastructure, IT system, etc., as well as a measurement of the financial/operational damage depending on the time of the year. Financial and operational impacts may include the loss of sales, brand credibility, specific industry compliance fines, legal fees, PR (public relations) management, etc. Another important aspect of a BIA includes mapping out your business model to determine where interdependencies lie between different departments and vendors that support your company. The larger a company, the more complex the business model tends to be; making it more difficult to identify workflows and resources….
This week I will be focusing on one of the most destructive natural disasters – hurricanes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that 2013 will be an “active or extremely active” hurricane season with a 70 percent chance of 13-20 “named storms” in the Atlantic. Hurricane High Risk Locations Hurricanes are large, spiraling tropical storms that can reach up to 160 miles per hour and unleash more than 2.4 trillion gallons of rain a day. In the Atlantic, hurricane season starts June 1st and ends November 30th and in the Pacific, the season starts May 15th and ends November 30th. We can see that the U.S. eastern and southeastern coasts experience the highest risks of hurricanes. According to the NOAA, 80% of all major hurricanes strike either Florida or Texas, which begs the question why so many data centers are built in these two hurricane-prone states? Other states that offer high probability and large number of data centers are Georgia, New York and New Jersey. Some of the safest regions include the Midwest including the states of Illinois, Ohio and Michigan. None of these states have had direct hurricane hits. Other states in the west such as California…