The one and only goal of Disaster-Recovery
The one and only goal of Disaster-Recovery is to recover. The possibility that 50% of your resources will not be recovered when struck by disaster is very high. From our 15 years of experience, customers who had disasters got 50% defective servers.
A disaster recovery plan for business constitutes a set of procedures and protocols to protect and recover your business infrastructure in the hour of disaster. Such a plan, normally documented in written form consists of actions and plans to be taken before and after a disaster. Now the intensity of a disaster is subjective. It can be natural or man-made. The management in this plan ranges from examining the situation, providing the necessary input and support, and putting the plan into action in the hour of need.
Humans have this natural tendency to look on the bright side. Last week we tested a customer’s environment with 100 servers replicated by VMware SRM. At the 4th server we notice that the installation of VMware SRM was wrong. Meaning this customer was sure he had replication but he has no DR!!!
It’s not wrong to always think positive but the situation becomes very much problematic if you don’t plan for the worse. This is the reason many executives of different companies are prone to ignore the disaster recovery. A decent approach to catering this situation is by formulating a disaster recovery plan.
Regardless of the size of your company, the odds are high that if your company faces any sort of disaster, the chance of your company going out of business is itself a prospect. The survival of a company depends on a number of factors such as the size of your company, the number of workers, the revenues it generates, the risks it takes and the investment it entails. Without a well-organized DR plan, your company has 50% chances of failing. The probability of a disaster is somehow questionable for some people. They think that spending a huge amount of money on planning and never have to deal with a disaster is somehow not justifiable. Let’s just assume this to be true. By this same logic, people who have health insurances and never have a single major disease throughout their life, are probably insane too.
Test Test Test
On a survey made by Vision Solutions, they have mentioned some of the most pressing trends in business continuity today including: Over 50% of pros lacking HA/DR confidence, Downtime costs over $100,000/hr, Why 43% of business lose data, 4 common DRaaS infrastructures.
From our experience, customers who had “fail over” got 50% defective servers. They had mentioned 3 main risks at disaster event: Having a DR plan that doesn't function when it is needed, Dealing with problems at disaster case. The business lose money, trust, spend resources time and hurt business credibility. Your recovery plan get to be tested once. At Live Disaster. If it doesn't work, you may lose your business.
There is one solution to this risks: Identifying weaknesses in the DR plan prior to an actual disaster situation. Make Sure Your Disaster Recovery Site really Works.
Program Management
A disaster recovery project has a consistent structure making it easy to organize and execute. Following are the steps that should be taken in controlling a disaster.
· Business Impact Analysis works on two principle levels. Identification of the most important business functions and IT systems, followed by the examination of assets which support them.
· Risk Assessment determines the external and internal threats, and the negative impacts of vulnerabilities on IT assets.
· Recovery Strategies work on defining, building and test the steps that could be invoked if an actual disaster strikes the company. Such processes provide a detailed step by step plan to combat the disruptive changes in a disaster which are easy to use and can reduce the damage.
· Program Maintenance consists of guidelines and procedures which ensure that the strategy designed to combat a disaster is implemented throughout the course of recovery.
Problems at Disaster Case
· Inefficiency of the plan: Sometimes most businesses have some kind of a backup plan but it is not a disaster recovery plan. The client may have the right technologies, but they don’t know how to utilize them in the dealing of that disaster. This makes your plan very vulnerable and inefficient. In a disaster, the most valuable thing that you need is a calm head. The inefficacy is mainly due to poor Business Impact Analysis (BIA). BIA functions to relate the specific risks and their impact on the business operations and financial performance. Risk can affect the entire company or its small part. It works on a series of parameters. The first parameter works on understanding how the business unit operates. It understands how the sub-units within the business organizations coordinate and work. It calculates the average revenues generated by the company per hour and its dependencies on internal/external investors. A BIA should present a clear image of the actual impact of a disaster on the business.
· Improper Testing: Just like backups, if you don’t have a disaster management plan that is not tested, it’s useless to have a plan. Multiple factors should be foreseen before the disaster. Understanding that how will the plan be executed? Who will execute the plan? What should be the priorities for the recovery of service and data? These are questions which should be answered using a disaster stimulation. This helps you to learn things beforehand. The problem with most of the programs is that it is not tested. The best way to test your plan is to generate a hypothetical disaster. Try to find the nature and the intensity that this disaster can cause. Form a list of guidelines and principle on how you wish to tackle this issue. After the formulation, generate a list of priorities. These are your action plans in order.
· Wrong Technologies: In many cases, even after the disaster recovery plan was there, the plan fails to deliver just because the technology proposed in the model becomes outdated. Wrong technologies may happen if you try to save too much. Buying of relatively cheaper things, you are simply compounding the chances of a failed recovery. Let’s just suppose you buy cheap SAN with cheap drives, cheap memory stick and cheap cables, when the things go wrong, the quality of tools you utilize is very important. As a result, the disaster recovery system becomes unreliable. Other than that, the incomplete inventory of the equipment may also create a lot of problems in handling the situation. The companies which possess some sort of a disaster plan, the initiation normally comes from the IT departments. Just because they understand the implications of an outage of even a single server. As a result, the DR has been very much operative in the companies with strong IT networks.
· Loss of investors’ confidence and corporate image: When you build a business empire, irrespective of its scale, the regulation of finances is very crucial. Disasters result in enormous business losses. Investments are very important to run a company. To run a business you need good amount of investments too. It not only strengthens your company financially but helps to generate better revenues with the amount of money you have, Thus, no matter what happens, investors’ confidence in your policies and management is very important. If your company lacks that corporate image, the investors may withdraw their investments. In cases of disaster, your company should have an effective recovery plan. This will maintain the confidence of your investors and will strengthen your image in the corporate sector.
· Legal Issues: In this technological era, privacy is very important. It helps to maintain the autonomy and individuality of a company. IT security threats are much greater today than they used to be in the past. Penetration of important data, hacking, loss of operations and financial damage are the problems companies face every day. As a result, companies require more IT services to ensure the continuity of different critical business procedures and recovery of the important data. Penetration of private data leads to serious legal issues. Thus the government has imposed some regulations to ensure that the companies have effective DR plans. The government may fine the companies in a violation.
Make sure your DR site really works: www.ensuredr.com