Business continuity and medium size enterprises

Once upon a time, high tech disaster recovery and business continuity solutions were the preserve of multinationals with buckets of cash. No longer, says Richard Boud…

Once upon a time, high tech disaster recovery and business continuity solutions were the preserve of multinationals with buckets of cash. Extra mirrored copies of data required not only expensive disk storage, but costly software too. However, over the past few years these facilities have become more and more affordable to a wider range of businesses that previously would not have considered them.

And with the greater availability has come greater awareness. Vendors are quick to tell scare stories of the impact a severe failure can have on your business. Figures from analysts range from thousands to millions of pounds lost for each hour your business is down, not just from the interruption to revenue, but also in terms of lost reputation. Events ranging from 9-11 to increased requirements for regulatory compliance have meant an ever increasing interest from the non-IT side of the business in ensuring that data is protected, and that IT systems can be recovered following a failure.

So, if you work for a medium size enterprise, how should you be emulating the practices of the multinationals, that have had years to exploit all the advanced functionality available today? Use remote mirroring and geographic clustering to a standby site to ensure fast recovery from a complete loss of your main site? Or take periodic snapshots of your production data to allow you to roll back to the last known good copy? Perhaps implement backup to disk?

All these options have value, and may be just what your business needs. But it can be easy to become carried away by the latest technological advances, and neglect the basic disciplines which you should always ensure take priority. In our experience at Technica, an implementation of any complex solution must be done on a firm base. It’s best to take a step back and look at your current environment with a neutral eye:

Invest in the basics
Do you already have a minimum ability to recover, and are you sure it works – now and in the future. Nine times out of ten or more, this means tape backup.

Review your current method – does it work reliably? For a technology/discipline that has been around almost as long as computing itself it is hard to believe quite how often this is still seen as a point of pain by many companies.

Invest the time in making basic tape backup utterly predictable – it may not be sexy, it may not be cutting edge, but you will sleep much more soundly knowing that if the worst comes to the worst you will always be able to go back to tape.

By tape backup, we mean recovery too – test this frequently and regularly. And note that recovery is different from restore. You may be able to get data back from tape, but is it usable?

Protect the things that matter
Find out from the business what its recovery needs really are – don’t try and guess at these. Get business sponsorship for this exercise to make sure your questions receive proper attention, and the answers get proper visibility.

Quantify what you are protecting against
Categorise the types of failure you are preventing against. Rank these by the likelihood of them occurring and criticality, making sure your time and money are well spent in insuring against the most likely problems.

Build recovery capability for the business, not just IT
Don’t just look at the IT solution. Ensure users, and their tools, whatever they are, will be available following the anticipated events you are catering for.

Look at processes and services, not servers. There is a natural tendency for IT people to consider their patch and neglect aspects which are outside their normal day to day responsibility. However, no-one will thank you if, following a successful failover to your DR site, none of the staff have anywhere to sit.

Do your best to understand dependencies between seemingly separate systems. There’s little value in recovering a key application if the standard method of communication with customers – email for example – is unavailable. A common result when these dependencies are investigated is that all systems seem to be so interwoven that everything has to be treated as the highest criticality. This may make the job of building sufficient contingency longer, but if these dependencies are formally recorded it will emphasise to the business just how important even the humblest applications are.

Keep it simple
Once you know what you can recover and how you will do it, record it. Create formal processes, publicise them, and make sure that other members of staff can carry them out when you’re not around.

And ensure that these processes are living documents – each time you go through change control, they should be referenced to check whether an update is needed.

With these foundations in place, you can then investigate more sophisticated technology to deliver business continuity, safe in the knowledge that you have secured the basics.

Richard Boud is with Technica UK. Technica is exhibiting at Storage Expo the UK's largest event dedicated to data storage, now in its 4th year, the show features a comprehensive FREE education programme, and over 90 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 13 - 14 October 2004. www.storage-expo.com

•Date: 10th September 2004 •Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: BC general
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