July 24th, 2010
Disaster Pllanning tool chosen by 3,000 plus enterprises
Just
because your company is not a major corporation with hundreds of offices and
thousands of employees does not mean your are not under the
same pressures to maintain access to critical information in order to run your
business and remain competitive. But buying the same complex and expensive
solutions as the major players in your industry can be cost-prohibitive -- and
unnecessary. You feel the same pressures to secure your data as a massive
corporation does, but without the massive budget.
The
disaster planning template
is the way to go. Over 3,000 enterprises world wide have chosen it as the
tool of choice.
-
more info
July 13th, 2010
Disasters can occur any where at any time
Disasters are unpredictable by nature and can
strike anywhere at anytime with little or no warning. Recovering from one is
expensive and time consuming, particularly for those who have not taken the time
to think ahead and prepare for such possibilities.
Disaster
Planning - Janco has found that 80% of all enterprises that do not have a
disaster recovery / business continuity plan in place before a disaster occurs
never reopen. However, when disaster strikes, those who have prepared and
made recovery plans survive with comparatively minimal loss and/or disruption of
productivity.

Disasters can take several different forms. Some
primarily impact individuals -- e.g., hard drive meltdowns -- while others have
a larger, collective impact. Disasters can occur such as power outages, floods,
fires, storms, equipment failure, sabotage, terrorism, or even epidemic illness.
Each of these can at the very least cause short-term disruptions in normal
business operation. But recovering from the impact of many of the aforementioned
disasters can take much longer, especially if organizations have not made
preparations in advance.
Most of us recognize that these potential problems
as possibilities. Unfortunately the randomness of some of these disasters lulls
some organizations into a sense of false security-"that's not likely to happen
here." However, if proper preparations have been made, the disaster recovery
process does not have to be exceedingly stressful. Instead the process can be
streamlined, but this facilitation of recovery will only happen where
preparations have been made. Organizations that take the time to implement
disaster recovery plans ahead of time often ride out catastrophes with minimal
or no loss of data, hardware, or business revenue. This in turn allows them to
maintain the faith and confidence of their customers and investors.
Disaster Recovery Planning is the factor that makes
the critical difference between the organizations that can successfully manage
crises with minimal cost and effort and maximum speed, and those that are left
picking up the pieces for untold lengths of time and at whatever cost providers
decide to charge; organizations forced to make decision out of
desperation.
-
more info
June 18th, 2010
Disaster Plan Common Failures
Disaster Recovery Business
Continuity - Common Failures
Most common mistakes made in Disaster Recovery and
Business Continuity Planning are eliminated by implementing the Janco Disaster
Recovery and Business Continuity Template.
Problems that are avoided are:
-
Failure to identify every potential event
that can jeopardize the infrastructure and data that your enterprise depends
-
Failure to cross-train personnel in
disaster recovery and business continuity
-
Failure to create a communication processes
which will work when your communication infrastructure is lost
-
Failure to have adequate backup power
-
Failure to know which resources need to be
restored first
-
Failure to have adequate physical documentation of your
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan
-
Failure to validate the adequacy of your
back ups
-
Failure to test your Disaster Recovery and
Business Continuity plan
-
Failure to have passwords available to the
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity team
-
Failure to keep your Disaster Recovery and
Business Continuity plan up to date
-
more info
June 10th, 2010
A disaster occurs -- now what?
A disaster
or business interruption occurs, what do you do? A quick roadmap to follow
is:
-
Do not
panic and remain calm! When a disaster or business interruption occurs the
first priority number is to ensure the safety of the employees.
-
Evaluate the disaster! Determine the impact on your personnel
and enterprise operations, this evaluation the event is critical in making the
decision to activate the disaster recovery business continuity procedures.
-
Communicate with everyone that can be impacted! Communicate with
your team, managers, affiliates, and vendors frequently. Even if there is no
status to report, do not leave anyone guessing or letting them draw their own
conclusions.
-
-
Be
decisive! Once you have determined the level of disaster and everyone is safe
to operate, it is time to make the decision if you need to implement the
business continuity procedures or if the downtime for recovery acceptable.
-
Start
the process! Start with recovering the most business critical systems first to
restore business operations to a functional level. There should not be any
question, which order which applications need to be restored first.
-
Lock
down all backups and critical documentation! The first step to the recovery is
having a set of data to recover from. This could be anything from archived
tape, local disk copy, and a co-location or disaster recovery data center.
-
Use multiple solution paths! Assume that nothing will work and
have alternatives in place
-
Reactivate normal operations! Once the systems are operational,
the disaster is over and systems are repaired it is time to move the workloads
back to where they were originally.
-
more info
May 27th, 2010
Next Disaster Requires Culture of Preparedness
At the center of the recent White House report
"Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned," there is a call to "foster a new, robust
culture of preparedness."
The challenge comes after the report details the long
list of tragedies that last year's deadly hurricane wrought, including more than
1,330 deaths and $96 billion in property damage. In terms of communications, 38
centers that normally handled 911 calls failed, while 3 million customers lost
phone service.
The report urges a wide variety of players to build
this new culture, including myriad federal agencies and tens of thousands of
state and local emergency first responder agencies. And it calls on private
citizens and the private sector to take part.
-
more info
May 11th, 2010
Regulatory compliance impacts disaster planning process
Increasing regulatory oversight: as a result of recent natural disasters,
man made disasters (Gulf oil spill), and acts of terrorism (the attempted Time
Square bombing)), industry and governmental regulations concerning the distance
between disaster recovery
sites and redundancy levels continue to tighten. In addition, highprofile
customer data security breaches have led to calls for stricter regulatory
compliance controls across industries (Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and
European Union Privacy laws). -
more info
May 5th, 2010
Improve your RTO and RPO
How long can your Enterprise afford to be without
your data? With an accelerated disaster recovery program, you never have to
answer this question. Download this outline learn how the Janco Disaster
Recovery Business Continuity Template can reduce RPOs and RTOs even more.

Disaster Recovery Guide
Business
Continuity Planning
ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 17799,
Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA Compliant

What is Disaster Recovery and how does the
Disaster Recovery Planning Template help?
This DRP Template can be used for any sized
enterprise.
The template and supporting
material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. The complete
package includes:
- Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity
Template
- Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
- Work Plan
- Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Audit
Program
With lost data being a competitive liability, there
is no room for downtime in today's business world.
-
more info
April 27th, 2010
Disadvantages of tape as backup media
Tape is used for backup and archive because it is very inexpensive, but it is
an old technology that has been available almost since the dawn of computing.
There are several issues with tape-based backup:

- Tape-based backup is a time-intensive process that is potentially
disruptive to your applications; this issue is commonly referred to as the
backup window problem.
- Because of its impact on applications and resources, tape-based backups
are usually not performed more than once a day, and often only once every
several days, meaning that
there are very few tape-based recovery points
available for use over the course of a week.
- Because your data is changing very frequently (on the order of seconds or
minutes), fewer recovery points mean you are risking the loss of large amounts
of current data for a given recovery.
- Once it is clear that a recovery needs to occur, it takes time to perform
recovery tasks including locating the correct tape, transporting it (if it's
offsite), restoring it to disk and restarting the application with the
recovered data.
- As a storage media for backup, tape is not entirely reliable; in fact,
leading analyst groups state that as many as 1 in 4 backup tapes suffer from
some sort of problem that precludes performing a
recovery
-
more info
April 22nd, 2010
The Difference Between Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning Defined
Disaster
Recovery Planning (DRP) is the process by which you resume business
after a disruptive event. This
typically means that you can get the enterprise computers, networks, and data
base operational. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like
malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.
Given the
human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to
ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event. However
Janco has found that over one third of all enterprises have had to activate
their Disaster Plans in the last few years.

Business Continuity
Planning (BCP) suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can
keep the enterprise going and meet it business objectives. This goes beyond the
enterprise computers, networks and data bases. However, the two terms are married under
the acronym DR/BC or DRP/BCP. At any rate, Disaster Recovery Planning and/or
Business Continuity Planning facilitate how a company will keep functioning
after a disruptive event until its normal facilities are
restored.
-
more info
April 16th, 2010
Network Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity CIO's Concern
In
addition to the lack of a consolidated disaster recovery /
business continuity plan for the network management system, network
operations are plagued by other problems:
-
Network
recovery plans are impacted by unanticipated traffic growth, configuration
issues; link overloads due to traffic rerouted around failed network elements,
and more.
-
Changes
may lead to undocumented side effects, so understanding the impact of changes
before making them is essential for reliable network operations.
-
The
monotonous work of making simple changes to hundreds or thousands of devices
or objects is error prone and often difficult to reproduce in the recovery
mode.
To
add to the pressure, network operations teams are expected to run larger
networks that have become many times more important to the business, and to do
so with fewer staff members. These conditions exacerbate the problems
associated with disparate disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
-
more info
April 7th, 2010
Cloud Recovery Not Easy - Disaster Recovery Not Under User Control

Microsoft officials still have not provided many
details about what caused the outage, other than to say it was a core system
failure. The failure is unrelated to Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and/or
Microsoft's Azure datacenters, as the company has continued to run the Sidekick
back-end on the same infrastructure it has been running on before Microsoft
acquired the company in 2008.
The Microsoft/Danger team apologized for the amount
of time they are taking to restore contacts, photos, e-mail and other Sidekick
services to which users lost access at the start of the month. The team said
they were taking their time "to make sure we are doing everything possible to
maintain the integrity of your data."
The team still is not committing to an exact
recovery timetable, but is saying restoration should begin this week. Microsoft
said, "We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin
restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of
the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores)
shortly thereafter."
After telling users that they likely had lost all
of their personal data, the Microsoft/Danger team then said they expected to be
able to recover some of their data. Mid-weeklast week, they said they expected
to recover "most if not all" of the missing user data.


What is a Disaster Recovery and
Business Continuity Plan
Disaster recovery and business
continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive
events - whether those event might include a hurricane or simply a power outage
caused by a backhoe in the parking lot. The CIO's involvement in this process
can range from overseeing the plan, to providing input and support, to putting
the plan into action during an emergency.
-
more info
April 3rd, 2010
Backup strategies developments defined
Disaster recovery and
business continuity solutions that combine the latest advancements in
disk-based backup with
secure, integrated online technologies offer businesses fast and assured
recovery of their critical business data while freeing limited technical staff
for more value-driven tasks. They also reduce the burden of removing the data
and storing it safely off-site, protecting it from local disasters.
The top reasons businesses are turning to this
technology:
- Comprehensive and reliable data protection assures up-to-date
recovery of all critical business data, including the backup of data in open
files
- Automatic and secure off-site electronic vaulting guarantees
successful disaster recovery
- Better control over restoring data gives businesses access to
data when and where its needed - for any reason
- Improved security for all sensitive data ensures protection
during backup, transmission and storage
- A complete data protection solution addresses the entire data
protection workflow and provides a higher level of reliability, productivity
and cost containment
- Immediate data restoration either over the Internet or from
on-site rapid recovery appliances reduces downtime costs
- Enhanced ability to demonstrate compliance with regulations
around information protection is enhanced through consistent, repeatable
processes and controls
- Freedom from routine backup and restore tasks allows
redirection of staff time to value-driven projects with greater impact on
productivity and profitability
- Increased competitive advantage is promoted through improved
access to data, more predictable cost control and flexible solutions that
change with the business
- Greater reliability in recovering all data where and when
needed is ensured, with successful data recovery guaranteed in
writing
-
more info
March 21st, 2010
DRP Backup Solutions
To plan your data protection solution appropriately, you must
first understand the type of technology environment that you are running.
Consider the following:
-
Direct
attached storage (DAS): The simplest
backup and restore environment, DAS usually consists of a standalone tape
drive or an autoloader attached directly to the server that it is protecting.
Businesses that operate DAS usually require backups only daily and/or weekly,
maintain only a few (one or two) networked servers on each network and do not
use online business-critical operations.
-
Network
backup: LAN/SAN-based
backup storage uses devices that are managed centrally from a single console
through a single backup server, reducing hardware costs, and management time.
Businesses that operate LAN/SAN-based backup usually require continuous,
business-critical operations as well as hourly or daily backups; have multiple
networked servers; and can run multiple operating
systems.
-
more info
March 4th, 2010
Disaster planning, emergency preparedness, or business continuity
Disaster
planning, emergency
preparedness, or business
continuity (and experts note that there are differences) - the goals are ultimately the same: to get an organization back up and
running in the event of an interruption.
The problem causing the interruption could be one computer crashing or an
entire network crashing. Or it
could be an electrical outage or the result of a terrorist activity. The goal is to have some contingency
plans in the event of a problem. A
disaster recovery plan exists to preserve the organization so that it can
continue to offer its services.
A
disaster recovery plan is a users' guide - the documentation - for how to
preserve an organization. In order
for a plan to be useful, it must be created before an interruption occurs. Business continuity is disaster
recovery. Lost revenue is a driving
force in business continuity. The
reason to do a recovery plan is essentially to keep the funding coming in and
the services going, and the clients being served.
-
Emergency
planning are those procedures and steps done immediately after an
interruption to business.
-
Disaster
recovery are the steps taken to restore some functions so that
some level of services can be offered.
-
Business
continuity is restoration planning, completing the full circle to
get your organization back to where it was before an
interruption.
In
order to write your plan, you have to do some planning. This planning is the
process that will get you to the step where you then commit your plan to paper -
you cant write a plan until you do the preparation. The most difficult thing is getting
started; the second most difficult task is keeping the plan
current.
-
more info
February 25th, 2010
Disaster Planning for international enterprises
Disaster
recovery and business
continutiy plans for internationaly base organizations need to take in to
account limitiations that various counties place on location of data.
Many parts of Europe forbid some data from being transmitted or
stored outside of the country. Canada also has some rules that prohibit some
data being stored in the United States due to the U.S. Patriot Act's provisions
that let the federal government examine corporate records.
It's important to note that the legal issues are local to where
your customer resides. You have to understand the laws and make sure that
personally identifiable data and some financial records are kept local if
required by the law.
This could be an issue as cloud computing systems become more
distributed. Indeed, while the primary facility may be in-country, the failover
site, or perhaps the site used when the primary site is under maintenance, could
be across the border and, thus, noncompliant.
-
more info
February 20th, 2010
Disater Plan Manual - CIO and CSO conflict
When the task of disaster recovery
planning (DRP) is dropped in the laps of information security managers and
IT staff, DRP becomes a security problem. If the disaster plan is handed off to an organization's
information security officer or IT director with little or no support, the
result is usually either a set of a few policies and procedures without a solid
foundation in risk assessment, or a long-winded document that overreaches and
focuses on the wrong issues.
When this happens, the disaster recovery plan
often does more harm than good. Thinking that disaster recovery is assured
by a novice's tape backup rotation plan and off-site storage in a cabinet down
the hall could lead to overconfidence, false statements during audits or
contract negotiations, or even encourage risky data, network, and service
management behavior. Mixing up a data, recovery procedure for a full-blown plan
or inflated data-focused plan into a management policy and standards is
dangerous stuff for the livelihood of a business.
Worse, there is the possibility that minimal action on the part of
the CIO and IT to protect information assets will cause senior management to
cool its support for enterprise risk management, disaster recovery and business
continuity. Organizations making the transition from small to medium size
occasionally check disaster recovery off the list when they have information
asset-preservation policies, and neglect to scale up disaster response decisions
and processes where they concern human safety.
-
more info
February 10th, 2010
A network outage is a disaster
A network outage is a business
interuption and a disaster for most enterprise. The disaster recovery
planning process needs to consider this as one of the most likely events to
occur.
As businesses rely more heavily on the
internet to transact business and link together branch offices, remote workers,
customers and business partners, the WAN connection becomes more important than
ever. A single pipe may be a company's only link to the outside world. If this
pipe goes down, crucial networking functions come to a crashing halt. Although
most business lines are reliable, outages are not very common. A software
company that has over 25 branch offices, each with a T-1, in several
3rd world locations has frequent outages. About once a month, they have a T-1
outage in one of the offices, lasting from 4 to 20 hours. During that time, that
remote office is effectively cut-off. Without the WAN line, you cannot make
phone calls, get e-mails or do any kind of electronic transaction. They are
unable to communicate with the outside world and effectively dead in the
water.
-
more info
January 26th, 2010
Backup and Backup Retention Policy Key to DRP

With companies storing data for longer periods of time to
meet compliance regulations and business best practices, the inherent risk of a
data breach is growing significantly. When it comes to data management, today's
enterprises must balance a number of divergent requirements that often compete
for priority. Many organizations routinely store backup tapes off site to meet
operational requirements and business continuity objectives. However, backup
tapes can easily be lost during transport, and remote storage facilities may
lack adequate security. Backup and archival solutions are designed only to
preserve data; they don't protect against unauthorized access. Only data
encryption can effectively safeguard sensitive data by rendering it unreadable
without access to the encryption key. -
more info
January 11th, 2010
Microsoft sites crash
Ongoing
problems with a Microsoft Corp. Web site handling software licenses have left
some business customers unable to activate and use their Microsoft apps for more
than a month.
Microsoft first took down its Volume Licensing Service Center
for maintenance in early December, after attempts to merge multiple licensing
sites into a single, more secure site backfired for some users.
Those affected include businesses purchasing Microsoft software,
or resellers and integrators handling newly-purchased software for business
customers. Problems they have reported via Twitter include users losing access
to paid-for software licenses; an inability to login to the VLSC site and fix
this for one month or more; and six-hour waits on Microsoft telephone support
trying to fix their accounts;
One user said that Microsoft, unable to grant him access to his
account and license activation keys, was forced to physically mail him
replacement software.
-
more info
December 9th, 2009
Tape Backups Difficult to Coordinate
According to the U.S. Labor Department, more than 40
percent of all companies that experience a disaster never reopen - and more than
25 percent of those that do reopen after a disaster occurs will close down for
good within two years.
Yet many midsized companies find it difficult to regularly and
effectively back up data. The
traditional tape backup process is manual and time consuming: data is preserved
by taking "snapshots" of server activity, which are then placed on tape for
archiving. To make matters more complicated, effective manual backups typically become more
difficult to achieve as data spreads across multiple systems and
servers.
-
more info