Disaster Recovery

If you get it right, the end result is a more agile business with much improved intelligence.

Thus far, the focus for many organisations has been to find ways to capture and gain value from the information that it acquires. It may come from business applications or the web. The original source may not be electronic — casual conversations, newspapers and meetings are a massive source of corporate information — but there is much to be gained from the creation of electronic derivatives that can be fed into the operational activities of the organisation.

As the information-driven organisation evolves, the demands placed upon the data storage infrastructure become stronger. Accepted wisdom indicates that the basic storage requirement for organisations doubles every one or two years. This is increased further as the need to take backup copies, mirrors and replicas is taken into account. As the volume of data stored increases and as the importance of information to the organisation grows, an unacceptable burden of management is placed onto the organisation.

Despite the massive growth of the data storage industry, many organisations have preferred to invest in point solutions that address specific areas of pain. This results in a number of different tools, each with their own internal view of the storage infrastructure and its own administrative capabilities. In fact, within storage management solutions, there is a micro reflection of the very weakness that organisations have been working to be rid of.

It follows that, in the same way that an organisation needs to construct a meaningful information strategy, there is a need for a storage management strategy. This is not, however, a strategy just to enable storage managers or operational technicians to work more effectively. What is required is strategy that allows the business to see where its information resides and how it is being managed.

When we talk about the impact system failure can have on a business we usually think of loss of revenue during downtime. However, the impact is far greater than simply the inability to carry out transactions. The true effect to a business should be measured in terms of operations, financials, regulatory and legal implications. If a business is forced to operate without its systems for a significant period of time the day-to-day information we are used to extracting at the touch of a button will require tedious research and manual labour.

Transactions that would normally take place automatically will cease, staff will be unemployed without these systems, personnel and operating regulations will be more difficult to adhere to and subsequently the efficiency of a business will suffer and management will be faced with making vital decisions to carry the operation through the crisis.

The Interruption of Business Systems

If a business's systems are interrupted it will experience some serious financial losses, in many cases these can be fatal, and these losses are no longer covered by insurance. Should any of the fundamental functions within a business be disrupted then inevitably the lack of cash flow will prevent the company from deploying capital to keep the business running. The ultimate risk is that credit ratings suffer, shares go down, the business is unable to fulfil the legal requirements of suppliers' contracts, customers lose faith and may never return, and significant costs can be associated with restoring servers and systems.

Identifying Critical Functions

So when looking at the most appropriate data protection solution for your business the business contingency planner will need to identify the critical functions within the business and estimate the business loss for an outage and the effect time has on the impact. Once you have determined the impact of an incident on a business function, you can determine the recommended recovery timeframe for the function.

The main areas of assessment should be:
• The review of business expectations and service levels

• The review of existing business continuity measures

• Conducting a vulnerability study of existing infrastructure

• Reviewing operational policies and procedures

• Assessing recovery capabilities

• Examining options for reducing risk exposure


Critical applications can be identified in a number of ways:
• List all functions performed

• Interview business functional managers

• Conducting surveys with employees

• Using a questionnaire with the functional managers

Once the critical and necessary business functions have been identified, the next step is to establish the resources that are required to continue to perform those functions. Ensuring that you have the correct level of support for these technologies is imperative as well as ensuring that the solution you deploy is implemented and managed effectively.

A disaster recovery plan is now a business necessity. Whether your company is large or small, your data needs to be protected and accessible - even when your data centre is down.