How to successfully implement a disaster recovery plan

Most major organisations are now running critical enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). These applications are integrated across the enterprise to such an extent that they touch everyone from employees and customers to suppliers and partners, and they form the backbone for all business, from e-commerce to business intelligence.

Such integration across the enterprise presents the greatest challenge to the success of continuity and recovery. The more integrated the enterprise application environment is, the harder it is to recover, no matter what the process. This is because so much more must be available simultaneously.

While applications that run on a single platform, such as a mainframe, can be recovered as a single unit with little concern for other systems that may be interconnected, most ERP applications utilise a three-tier architecture: database, application, and presentation layers. They share a common database and are distributed to users across the globe via LANs and WANs.

The world's largest corporations deploy ERP, SCM, and CRM applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Sybase, and Siebel. In some cases, these applications process millions of transactions per hour, per minute, or even per second. Furthermore, the databases grow exponentially to accommodate all the data, very rapidly reaching the terabyte threshold and beyond.

Not only do the ERP applications process and store transaction data, but they also link to other applications, such as business intelligence, knowledge management, and e-business applications. Since these applications are at the heart of the enterprise, most organisations cannot afford downtime, let alone lost data. Furthermore, the level of criticality of these applications increases as people outside the enterprise access them via the Internet.

An integrated suite of ERP applications must match the business processes of an organisation, and must also run in such a way that data can be entered once to flow through to all the modules and be accessible to all users who need the information. Implementation is therefore complex, as is recovery in the event of a disruption. It is essential that the recovery solution involve testing of the applications, including user testing.

The Need for Business Continuity
As organisations extend their ERP applications, it becomes more important to reduce recovery time and recovery point objectives. In this new environment, traditional 48 to 72 - hour recovery times are no longer acceptable. Several factors combine to increase the need for business process availability and continuity and also raise the level of exposure:

1. Customers, suppliers, and partners now have access to ERP applications via customer relationship and supply chain management systems, via a website that interface with the core ERP applications. Specifically, when customers use the Internet, they have no tolerance for downtime.

2. ERP applications are the foundation for all process and transaction information within and beyond the enterprise; therefore, organisations are increasingly dependent on ERP processes and information. This encompasses all applications from the core transaction systems to supply chain management, customer relationship management, e-procurement, business intelligence, planning, budgeting, and knowledge management.

3. Organisations have spent a huge amount of time, effort, and money (in many cases years and tens of millions of dollars) on their implementations. This massive investment warrants continuity.

It is a fact that downtime can have a negative impact on customers, suppliers, manufacturing operations, regional stores, corporate offices, and shareholders. Possible effects of downtime could include un-met payroll, unshipped products, funds unable to be processed by accounts receivable, employees unable to get their work done, and disgruntled customers.

Working in Partnership
With such integrated, distributed, large, critical, and complex enterprise applications, it is important to involve business process owners in the design and implementation of a strategy for high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery. It is no longer sufficient to have the disaster recovery manager handle this alone, with only a standard recovery program consisting of backup tapes shipped to a hot site.

Knowledge of ERP applications and the underlying architecture has not typically been the domain of the business continuity and disaster recovery department. However, VERITAS Consulting consider it to be essential to understand the availability and continuity requirements of these applications and to be involved in the continuity planning process for these environments.

Your Data Centre is down - What's the plan?
Business leaders may recognise the need to move to more aggressive e-business recovery strategies, but they're often unwilling to fund the change. Education can help. One of the unexpected benefits of implementing an ERP system is that it requires the business and IT professionals to work together. This partnership should continue into the business continuity arena.

Whenever possible, before completing an enterprise application project as an implementation or upgrade continuity and recovery should be addressed. Then, the necessary procedures and solutions can be built into the environment, rather than being retro-fitted later.

The most successful ERP implementations are the result of a collaborative effort between the business and VERITAS Consulting in all phases, from selection, to customisation, to "go live." It follows logically that the business process owners, IT departments and VERITAS Consulting work together on the continuity and recovery plans.

The best plans are executed through discussion among professionals from various disciplines within an organisation. For example, the people who should take part in the planning and execution of a continuity and recovery strategy should include:

• Key business application users (Who is using the most critical applications?)

• The manager of each critical process (e.g., finance manager, payroll manager, customer relationship manager, supply chain manager, e-business manager, etc.)

• Internal and external customers, suppliers, and partners (to establish recovery requirements, including recovery time and recovery point objectives)

• Business process managers (when extending ERP to SCM, CRM, e-business, etc., those business process managers should also be involved)

• Data centre managers

• ERP program directors for both business and information technology

• Disaster recovery specialists/business continuity/disaster recovery manager/VERITAS Consulting

• Software application specialists
• Database administrators
• Hardware specialists
• Networking specialists
• Systems engineers