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 By Bill Lang, CBCP, MBCI, CBCV.
Vendors create proprietary systems and backup/restore utilities for several reasons:
* To take advantage of hardware and operating system functions to make their systems more efficient.
* To secure their proprietary data base structures.
* To secure the data within the structures.
* Because their data base structures don’t lend themselves to import/export efficiently to other utilities.
* To secure compression algorithms or other coding that would reveal their competitive advantage.
* To protect their market share by not allowing third party exits and interfaces to the system.
* To create income through the company and its support structure.
* Some combination of the above.
The decision to create proprietary backup/restore utilities creates an exposure for IT disaster recovery: What if the backup or restore doesn’t work, or doesn’t work as it should?
Here are some things you can and should do to address the exposure:
* Ensure the vendor has 24/7/365 priority support specifically for tests and disasters along with SLAs.
* Ensure that the contract/agreement has penalties for the vendor not responding to you and not meeting disaster or test SLAs.
* Investigate whether the product has an 'export' feature that will put the data in some format readable by another product or utility. You may want to use exports for backup instead.
* Explore exits or interfaces that would drop transactions off in a flat file format for emergencies.
* Ensure that someone tracks the stability of the vendor and alerts the appropriate people should the vendor enter bankruptcy or discontinue support for the product or utilities.
* Along with the above, ask the vendor annually what their direction is with the product and utilities to get a head start if they should indicate movement away from it. A lack of regular updates or patches indicates a movement away from the product.
* Very rarely, but at times, proprietary utilities are dependent on specific hardware, so ask the vendor about compatibility with your recovery hardware every time the recovery hardware changes.
* Test restores with every new release, update, or patch.
* See if the vendor will use a source code escrow so that you can access the source and write or correct the utilities yourself should the vendor go bankrupt.
Recovering from a disaster is no time to find out that the vendor’s proprietary utilities don’t work. With the above precautions, you should have no problems with proprietary vendor systems and backup/restore utilities.
Author
Bill Lang, CBCP, MBCI, CBCV, is the Business Continuity Program Manager for VCPI and it clients (www.vcpi.com). Bill uses his 25+ years IT experience to implement BCM techniques that have been proven successful in disasters and is an active contributor to many online forums, long term care and BCM conferences, and has memberships in several emergency management and BCM related standards committees.
•Date: 27th January 2009• Region: US/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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