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• Perform an initial risk assessment to determine current information systems vulnerabilities.
• Perform an initial business impact analysis to document and understand the interdependencies among business processes and determine how the business would be affected by an information systems outage.
• Take an inventory of information systems assets such as computer hardware, software, applications, and data.
• Identify single points of failure within the information systems infrastructure.
• Identify critical applications, systems, and data.
• Prioritize key business functions.

The Disaster Recovery Plan Template has tools that can be used immediately and defined in detail all of these responsiblities and provides a work plan that can be use as is.

How can organizations effectively evaluate their business continuity needs and ensure that the technologies in place are effective? One key step is to conduct a business impact analysis which examines all the business functions and assesses the damage if a function suffers outages. Storage systems - and more specifically the data thatÂ’s stored in them - are extremely relevant for business continuity. But so are the applications, servers, networks and people who run the applications.

Metric for business continuity and disaster recovery include timelines for recovery point objectives (RPOs) and factors defined as recovery time objectives (RTOs).  For data to be available when needed, it needs to be replicated to a remote site. Depending on the desired RPO, that could be synchronous or asynchronous data transfer. In some cases it could be a combination of data that is replicated synchronously to a location that is geographically close and then asynchronously replicated to an out-of-region recovery center.

But data is only part of the equation. Servers, networks and other IT components also play a major role. Just having the data replicated might be okay for a disaster recovery environment with longer acceptable recovery time objectives.  The high cost of storage, communications, network access, and software replication are just a few of the challenges in implementing adequate business continuity.  For a complete real business continuity plan, more than just the data needs to be replicated and available at a secondary site - employee workstations, communication, servers, and applications need to be available. Only with a complete business continuity and disaster recovery plan and strategy in place can organizations ensure continuous operation of the enterprise and availability of vital information.

For example, a small distribution company (revenues of $25,000,000) located in Florida could rate  a hurricane an high probability with a high impact, an earthquake threat as low probability and high impact, while the threat of utility failure due to a power outage could rate high probability and high impact. So in this company's risk analysis, a hurricane and power outage would be a higher risk than an earthquake and would therefore be a higher priority in the disaster recovery plan.

• Voice: It would be absolutely essential for disaster recovery personnel to communication with one another on a common voice channel. A useful service in this regard is provided by the push-to-talk voice call system that has been incorporated by the GSM standard in its Phase 2+ version as an additional service. The push-to-talk system enables an almost instant voice connection to be setup between the speaker and the intended call recipients, thus saving precious time in emergency situations.
•  Data: Disaster recovery personnel at the disaster site must be able to exchange data with the Remote Command Center in real time. Further, the personnel must be able to exchange data with one another. Lastly, they should be able to connect to the public internet and possibly to a remote third party via a secure link.
• Location information: Each of the disaster recovery personnel at the disaster site must be able to Â’seeÂ’ the locations of all other active personnel in a specified area, relative to their own positions. This service may prove crucial in situations where in a worker want to warn nearby workers of dangerous conditions (e.g. collapsing buildings after an earthquake) or wants to request backup for immediate help in rescuing disaster victims.

Even if the job is assigned to the most responsible person in the entire company – the person who’s always around – there's no guarantee that the job will be done correctly, consistently, or in a timely manner across sites. The office manager at one site may have a different method than the inside sales representative in another location. The marketing manager at a third site may perform the task with less consistency than the other two.

The complete restoration of water-soaked documents, particularly bound items, can be a costly process even under the most favorable conditions. In the majority of cases, the high costs involved do not justify the salvage and restoration of books which are in print and can be replaced. However, decisions relating to these factors are virtually impossible to make during a salvage operation and even when a disaster plan exists. On the other hand it might be unwise not to attempt to salvage everything, if an insurance assessment is required and a claim is to be made.

To help maintain business continuity and mitigate the risk of disaster or litigation, enterprises must have the ability to retain, protect, and recover ever-increasing volumes of data quickly, flexibly, and cost-effectively. It is no longer enough to have an adequate backup and recovery process in place to access data and restore enterprise operations in the event of a disaster, outage, or accidental loss. Today, organizations also need a disaster recovery and business continuity strategy designed to ensure that they can retain and manage data over the long term to satisfy regulatory, auditing, litigation, and other data management requirements.

All too often, enterprises that do implement backup and recovery systems end up with a mix of complex and costly storage and network technologies that require a wide range of specialized skills to operate. For example, many backup and recovery systems include legacy disk and tape drives, storage area networks (SANs) and Fiber Channel networking, and other technologies such as network attached storage (NAS) and Ethernet networking.  This only complicates the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Process.

That taken in account with the fact that over one third of all enterprises have had to activate their Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plans in the last few years is costing many CIOs and CTOs with many sleepless nights.

The CSO title is also used in many enterprises to describe the leader of the "corporate security" function, which includes the physical security and safety of employees, facilities and assets. This individual often holds a title such as Vice President or Director of Corporate Security. Historically, corporate security and information security have been handled by separate departments.

The CSO has the responsibility for global and enterprise-wide information security; he/she is also responsible for the physical security, protection services and privacy of the corporation and its employees.

• Assessment the environment
• Determine capabilities and capacities of the enterprise
• Develop a preliminary work plan with detail action items
• Prioritize activities to develop the plan
• Define deliverables
• Obtain approvals and budget to develop the plan
• Assign responsibilities
• Implement a status reporting process
• Develop initial Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan
• Review and modify plan with operating groups and management
• Test plan

• Human error -  an administrator might delete an entire organizational unit (OU) instead of a particular user, or accidentally delete a service account, which could affect hundreds of users.
• Unexpected consequences -  an administrator might use a script to set one of the Extension Attributes in Active Directory only to find out that Extension Attribute contained data for another mission critical application that wonÂ’t work anymore because of the changes. The data must be restored as soon as possible.
• Malicious activity - both current and recently-terminated employees, as well as external service providers, might find ways to access your sensitive systems and data, and their knowledge can enable them to cause significant damage.  According to Entrepreneur, "four out of five IT-related crimes are committed from within an organization".  Moreover, CSO Online reports that "inside security breaches affect 49% of companies". Once your network is under attack, it's too late to plan - you need to have your diagnostic and recovery tools in place.
• Viruses -  Viruses can damage Active Directory data, and the replication process propagates those unwanted changes. Anti-virus software, of course, provides protection, but it is critical to be able to respond quickly to viruses that get through.

Power supplies and communication links are one of the most critical components in a DRP/BCP strategy.

Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks loom large in the collective memory for the magnitude of their destruction, but smaller-scale, localized disasters happen all the time: a fire in a building, human error that erases a server, a power outage in a town. Each can wreck a business in minutes and is much more likely to happen than a terrorist attack or a hurricane.

As gloomy as those scenarios may be, the name of the game for companies is "prepare for the worst; hope for the best." Companies can minimize the worst possible disruptions to their businesses and the lives of their employees by creating disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Such plans are not just for large and well-connected companies, but for small and midmarket companies as well.

These plans can protect company data and applications, and they can have a company back in business within 48 hours or less after a disaster. That's where Janco's Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template comes into play. The Templates provice the expertise to help companies craft their plans and then flesh out those plans with technology solutions.

As historic floodwaters start to recede along the Mississippi and other Midwestern rivers, local businesses in affected communities like Cedar Falls, Iowa, are busy assessing the impact on IT equipment and whether disaster recovery plans stood the test.

A maker of computer games in Cedar Falls, may be permanently displaced after Cedar River floodwaters reached 6 feet in its administrative offices and 5.5 feet in an adjoining warehouse. The company sustained about $250,000 in damage to inventory.

The firm's president said all 65 employees are now working temporarily in borrowed offices in three facilities.

As the floodwaters approached on June 9, employees scurried to save 120 PCs, 80 monitors and eight servers. Three high-end printers could not be removed in time.

The company plans to revise his disaster recovery plan. "When a river comes up 6 feet higher than it ever has before, it's tough to have that foresight," they said. "But it is probably going to happen again."

A software development company has plans to deal with tornados and electrical outages, but executives never dreamed they would have to contend with the Cedar River surpassing 500-year-flood levels. "Going through this experience [will] make those plans [more] than just part of an IT checklist," he said.

A key lesson learned was that companies must prepare for employees to miss work to help families and communities after natural disasters.

Only about 30% of visitors managed to enter Amazon.com, according to mobile and Internet management firm which tracks Web site performance.

The problem was not limited to the US as Amazon's U.K. storefront had similiar problems.

The U.K. site first experienced problems when its availability dropped as low as 38%.

Amazon said, "Some customers reported intermittent problems accessing Amazon retail Web sites. Amazon is working to resolve the issues, and Amazon's Web services are not affected."

Average load times jumped to 15 seconds versus 6 seconds.

During the period of site unavailability most shoppers having access problems got the cryptic error message "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable, which means little to nontechnical people. That message indicates that whatever caused the problem proved hard to isolate, making it impossible for the company to configure its system to trigger a more intelligible alert acknowledging the problem in plain English.

The more complex a system is, the more challenging it is to maintain, and a configuration problem here can cause problems somewhere else.

Whether backing up remote data onto centralized tape or disk backup systems, or replicating company assets between redundant data centers, wide-area data services (WDS) solutions enable organizations to move data between sites without the constraints of distance and throughput. One optimization system accelerates applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times faster than conventional transport mechanisms with up to a 95% reduction in WAN bandwidth utilization.   

There are really two kinds of disasters that can affect your data center, says the executive director of The Uptime Institute in Santa Fe, N.M. Those that do not affect your data center directly but do affect your region. Another is a disaster that affects your building directly; you will not recover until you recover the building. One of the most important decisions, but one that is often given little thought, is where to put the data center.

Rather than add more bandwidth, or invest in expensive, dedicated storage networks, WAN optimization can improve IP network performance sufficient to turn recovery into continuity. To help meet the objectives outlined above, a WAN optimization solution must be able to do three separate tasks for true business continuity: restrict bandwidth to backup applications during the allowed window and allocate it to critical applications in the event of a disaster, overcome latency and bandwidth limitations on the wire, and provide acceleration to roaming or displaced users redirected to alternative data sources.

Regardless of whether the data is being replicated from a massive cabinet, over IP-based storage or off a userÂ’s hard drive for compliance purposes, during the backup window maximum bandwidth should be available to ensure completion. This requires granular bandwidth management that can isolate applications on the network and provide a predictable, policy-based service level. Further, the solution should be able to distinguish between a user initiated file copy and one started by the backup daemon, and apply different bandwidth allocations to each.

Also, the solution must remove latency and protocol inefficiencies that constrain current WAN backups. Caching and compression technology combined with inline protocol optimization of commonly used file transfer protocols form a technology suite that improves the performance characteristics of a WAN, adding bandwidth and reducing the time needed to complete backups and restores. Moreover, it should be able to do this for individual devices and accommodate displaced and roaming users without the need for bulky appliances.

• Are you setting the right data protection goals?
• Have you established the best benchmarks?
• How can you optimize your backup model to meet your SLAÂ’s?
• Have you projected your data growth accurately?
• Will your technology fit all your needs?

To accomplish this you should:

• Set data protection goals based on buisness needs
• Establish performance benchmarks
• Optimize backup performance to exceed your benchmarks
• Forecast the capacity needs for both hardware and software
• Build a modular data protection architecture