Did you know that 40% of businesses do not re-open after a disaster? Or that it could cost an organization up to $600,000 per hour during a disaster scenario? In today’s “always on” world, businesses must continue to operate no matter what, which means that critical IT infrastructure must be available 24/7/365. In this session we will learn more about a holistic approach towards business continuity & IT resiliency and how organizations can achieve high levels of availability. We will also go over each stage of the business continuity lifecycle and talk about the importance of managed services, key processes and technologies that must be considered for a comprehensive Business Continuity & Resiliency plan.
Did you know that 40% of businesses do not re-open after a disaster? Or that it could cost an organization up to $600,000 per hour during a disaster scenario? In today’s “always on” world, businesses must continue to operate no matter what, which means that critical IT infrastructure must be available 24/7/365. In this session we will learn more about a holistic approach towards business continuity & IT resiliency and how organizations can achieve high levels of availability. We will also go over each stage of the business continuity lifecycle and talk about the importance of managed services, key processes and technologies that must be considered for a comprehensive Business Continuity & Resiliency plan.
Jul 20
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The Cycle of Alignment
Aligning IT and the business’ KPIs can be a difficult task. Companies generally rotate through three phases before they can actually begin to create a DR Capability. Avoid getting stuck in the cycle.
Minimize the time spent on aligning IT and the business’ wants to expedite the process. Ensure that the business and IT keep the lines of communication open and that both parties are willing to hear each other’s opinions.
Knowing IT’s existing ability to withstand and recover from disaster provides a baseline from which all future DR enhancements and/or downgrades can be made.
The business needs to be able to communicate the amount of time and data it can afford to loose in the event of a disaster in order to establish an initial target for DR improvements.
Business desires must be validated by balancing potential downtime losses with the cost of enhanced DR capabilities.
IT and the business must ensure that capabilities are aligned with requirements and that budgets are reasonable and can be achieved.
Business Impact Assessments (BIA) gauge the approximate costs and frequency of system downtime. Systems are then prioritized in terms of criticality, allowing organizations to focus attention and resources where they will be best spent. BIAs should be done before attempting to create any DR capabilities.
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measure of performance, or how well specific outcomes are achieved based on pre-defined processes and procedures
Having pre-defined business processes
Requirements for those business processes
Quantitative/qualitative measurement of the results and comparison with established goals
Identifying variances and adjusting processes and/or resources to achieve short-term goals
Recovery Point Objective, or RPO, is the point in time beyond which an organization cannot afford to lose information
e.g. the organization can afford to lose 24 hours data/processing
Recovery Time Objective, or RTO, is the amount of time an organization can afford to have its systems down
e.g. the organization's systems can be down no longer than one hour.
Shorter RTOs and RPOs provide greater protection, but at a greater cost. The inverse also applies.
Organizations care more about reducing data loss than restoring system operations
For most organizations, limiting data lost during a disaster is more important than minimizing downtime. This is likely because so much of a business’ day to day activities rely on the data.
It’s cheaper and easier to support longer recovery objectives. The percent of the yearly IT budget that is spent on DR decreases as RTOs and RPOs increase.
Continuity Assessment
Consider cost constraints, and carefully determine the right level of resilience for different parts of the business, striking a balance between investment and risk tolerance.
Solution Design
Outline all procedures, run book elements, recovery objectives, key authorizations, system and network configuration and detailed failover and fallback instructions.
Implementation
Prescriptive & tailored onboarding, recovery and testing process that delivers results quickly – and gets your first recovery test scheduled in 30 days.
Monitoring & Managed Recovery
Provides proactive and event-driven recovery & testing services – allowing you to take the management burden off your organization and free up in-house management resources while meeting your recovery goals.
Maintenance & Testing
Testing your playbook in hand and consistently checking on changes to application and systems for effective disaster management. Establishing a seasonal testing schedule to maintain accountability of your recovery policy
Managed Business Continuity provides proactive and event-driven recovery and testing services – allowing you to free up in-house management resources while meeting your continuity and resiliency goals.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provides continuous replication of critical applications, infrastructure, data and systems to the cloud, so you can recover within minutes of an IT outage.
Backup as a Service provides an off-site, point-in-time copy of critical application and user data, as well as complete images of your infrastructure systems – so you can recover in the event of data loss, or archive your data to meet compliance requirements.
High Availability Solutions
High availability solutions traditionally consist of a set of loosely coupled servers which have failover capabilities. Each system is independent and self-contained, yet the servers are health monitoring each other and in the event of a failure, applications will be restarted on a different server in the pool of the cluster. Windows Server Failover Clustering is an example of an HA solution. HA solutions provide health monitoring and fault recovery to increase the availability of applications. A good way to think of it is that if a system crashes (like the power cord was pulled), the application very quickly restarts on another system. HA systems can recover in the magnitude of seconds, and can achieve five 9’s of uptime (99.999%)… but they realistically can’t deliver zero downtime for unplanned failures. They also are flexible in that they enable recovery of any application running on any server in the cluster.
Fault Tolerant Solutions
Fault tolerant solutions traditionally consist of a pair of tightly coupled systems which provide redundancy. Generally speaking this involves running a single copy of the operating system and the application within, running consistently on two physical servers. The two systems are in lock step, so when any instruction is executed on one system, it is also executed on the secondary system. A good way to think of it is that you have two separate machines that are mirrored. In the event that the main system has a hardware failure, the secondary system takes over and there is zero downtime.
Background on the SHARE model: The Seven Tiers of Disaster Recovery was originally defined by SHARE to help identify the various methods of recovering mission-critical computer systems as required to support business continuity. Although the original known published concept dates back to the 1990s, Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery specialists today continue to use the 7 Tiers to illustrate continuity capabilities and costs at a very high level. The definitions for the various Tiers have been updated as technology has evolved in support of today's business requirements and their associated Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Tier 0: No off-site data – Possibly no recovery
Businesses with a Tier 0 business continuity solution have no business continuity plan. There is no saved information, no documentation, no backup hardware, and no contingency plan. The time necessary to recover in this instance is unpredictable. In fact, it may not be possible to recover at all.
Tier 1: Data backup with no hot site
Businesses that use Tier 1 continuity solutions back up their data and send these backups to an off-site storage facility. The method of transporting these backups is often referred to as "PTAM" - the "Pick-up Truck Access Method." Depending on how often backups are created and shipped, these organizations must be prepared to accept several days to weeks of data loss, but their backups are secure off-site. However, this tier lacks the systems on which to restore data.
Tier 2: Data backup with a hot site
Businesses using Tier 2 business continuity solutions make regular backups on tape. This is combined with an off-site facility and infrastructure (known as a hot site) in which to restore systems from those tapes in the event of a disaster. This solution will still result in the need to recreate several hours or even days' worth of data, but the recovery time is more predictable.
Tier 3: Electronic vaulting
Tier 3 solutions build on the components of Tier 2. Additionally, some mission critical data is electronically vaulted. This electronically vaulted data is typically more current than that which is shipped via PTAM. As a result there is less data recreation or loss after a disaster occurs. The facilities for providing Electronic Remote Vaulting consists of high-speed communication circuits, some form of channel extension equipment and either physical or a virtual tape library and an automated tape library at the remote site. IBM's Peer-to-Peer VTS and Oracle StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) Clustering are two examples of this type implementation.
Tier 4: Point-in-time copies
Tier 4 solutions are used by businesses that require both greater data currency and faster recovery than users of lower tiers. Rather than relying largely on shipping tape, as is common on the lower tiers, Tier 4 solutions begin to incorporate more disk based solutions. Several hours of data loss is still possible, but it is easier to make such point-in-time (PiT) copies with greater frequency than tape backups even when electronically vaulted.
Tier 5: Transaction integrity
Tier 5 solutions are used by businesses with a requirement for consistency of data between the production and recovery data centers. There is little to no data loss in such solutions; however, the presence of this functionality is entirely dependent on the application in use.
Tier 6: Zero or near-zero data loss
Tier 6 business continuity solutions maintain the highest levels of data currency. They are used by businesses with little or no tolerance for data loss and who need to restore data to applications rapidly. These solutions have no dependence on the applications or applications staffs to provide data consistency. Tier 6 solutions often require some form of Disk mirroring. There are various synchronous and asynchronous solutions available from the mainframe storage vendors. Each solution is somewhat different, offering different capabilities and providing different Recovery Point and Recovery Time objectives. Often some form of automated tape solution is also required. However, this can vary somewhat depending on the amount and type of data residing on tape.
Tier 7: Highly automated, business integrated solution
Tier 7 solutions include all the major components being used for a Tier 6 solution with the additional integration of automation. This allows a Tier 7 solution to ensure consistency of data above that which is granted by Tier 6 solutions. Additionally, recovery of the applications is automated, allowing for restoration of systems and applications much faster and more reliably than would be possible through manual business continuity procedures.