We talk to Allen Mitchel, Senior Technical Account Manager, MENA, CommVault Systems, and find out why a viable disaster recovery and business continuity solution should not be overlooked by any end user.
There is far more emphasis and focus on DR/BC in the region now than there was five years ago. This is partly due to worldwide events over the last decade that have driven business to think differently about ‘what do we do in the event of’ scenario. For example, many of the data management conversations, meetings and presentations that CommVault have with end users have an element of DR built into them – it is expected. Also, there is far more focus on BC in the tenders that end users issue as they realise that they have to think about the ‘what if’ factor as well as the ‘here and now’ factor.
In the face of a higher reliance on technology, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity have become absolutely vital for maintaining an edge in today’s competitive business environment.
As companies become more dependent on technology to conduct even simple business tasks, it is clear that protecting against disaster is vital for business success over the long haul. Disaster recovery planning and design are necessary activities that if overlooked, will place your company in a very uncomfortable position. Imagine explaining to thousands of customers why you’re not open, when your competitor across the street has actually extended hours. How would you tell your key suppliers that deliveries will not be needed or that payments will be delayed? Will your shareholders be sympathetic to a material impact on revenue and profits resulting from poor disaster planning?
Even though natural disaster are rare in the Middle East, there are other threats to business continuity. Security incidents, IT outages, physical disasters, and power outages can all impact production service and organisations ability to maintain operations. Most, if not all companies are aware of the importance of DR planning. As companies become more dependent on technology to conduct even simple business tasks, it is clear that protecting against disaster is vital for business success over the long haul.
Disaster recovery planning and design are necessary activities that if overlooked, will place your company in a very uncomfortable position. Imagine explaining to thousands of customers why you’re not open, when your competitor across the street has actually extended hours. How would you tell your key suppliers that deliveries will not be needed or that payments will be delayed? Will your shareholders be sympathetic to a material impact on revenue and profits resulting from poor disaster planning?
All storage and data management vendors have DR/ BC solutions of varying degree’s to address end user requirements however, it is often a factor of the $$ investment which determines the solution. There are some very high end storage solutions on the market that allow for complete BC resilience from a storage, data, automatic application restart and recovery and server point of view. Whilst providing high end, standby data centres complete with the physical hardware infrastructure is on one hand, reassuring, it is also a costly exercise.
This has given rise to organisations considering and investing in virtualisation technology such to provide them with solutions that allow for inbuilt DR / BC requiring the minimum of standby infrastructure. With these type of technologies organisations can seamlessly replicate their entire virtual infrastructure to a secondary site whilst also providing automatic application and server restart-ability and recovery – techniques that five years ago, would be far too costly for the majority of organisations.
Successful companies embrace a multi-tiered catalog of recovery technologies connected by a unified management platform. This approach enables IT departments to continuously balance cost vs. risk and protect data accordingly.
Given the advancements in network optimization, data compression, and data deduplication, the expectation that suitable DR has to be expensive is outdated. These now ubiquitous technologies enable IT departments to build affordable alternatives to expensive replication schemes while providing large improvements in RTO and RPO over tape-based disaster recovery. The ultimate goal for nearly any business is to build a recovery service catalog with mid-tier options to scale with changing business needs.
Cloud based options that offload much of the operational DR burden are growing in popularity. This can be especially valuable for corporate assets that are remote and beyond the reach of a traditional hub and spoke approach.
How can we differentiate between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?
When talking about business continuity, many organisations will often confuse it with Disaster Recovery. Whilst at first glance, the two topics may be regarded as the same, they are different and separated by how much the organisation is willing to invest to keep their service on the road in the event of a disaster. A Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy is expected to recovery your business or service within a given timescale after an interruption to service or disaster. The time to recover would usually be predefined in the a DR Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Depending on the criticality of the service, this may be set out in minutes, hours or even days for the less critical services. A Business Continuity (BC) strategy ensures that the business and/or service seamlessly continues in the event of an outage. This strategy would typically require a considerable amount more investment in high availability infrastructure, for example, geographically dispersed data centres, high availability hardware and synchronous replication/failover software storage technology. The goal here is to ensure that the business and/or service in not impacted in the event of a minor or major outage and both the investment and associated SLA’s reflect this.
Finally, since vendors started promoting business continuity as a technology solution in the late 90’s, it has now transformed into a more holistic process, encompassing all of the elements necessary to maintain the viability of the business entity during an interruption. Undoubtedly, the ability to use technology as described above is a very important aspect of business continuity, but it is one of many vertical components of the entire operational environment. Consider the facilities, personnel, equipment, supplies, etc., all of which also play a key role in restoring operations to a state of normalcy. The regulatory bodies have also recognised this and have clearly pointed out that business continuity planning is about maintaining, resuming, and recovering the business, not just the recovery of the technology and the associated service.
What should an End user consider when implementing a Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity solution?
All storage and data management vendors have BC solutions of varying degree’s to address end user requirements however, it is often a factor of the $$ investment which determines the solution. There are some very high end storage solutions on the market that allow for complete BC resilience from a storage, data, automatic application restart and recovery and server point of view. Whilst providing high end, standby datacentres complete with the physical hardware infrastructure is on one hand, reassuring, it is also a costly exercise. This has given rise to organisations considering and investing in virtualisation technology such as VMware, Citrix Zen and Hyper-V to provide them with solutions that allow for inbuilt BC requiring the minimum of standby infrastructure.
With technologies such as VMWare Site Recovery Manager (SRM), organisations can seamlessly replicate their entire virtual infrastructure to a secondary site whilst also providing automatic application and server restartability and recovery – techniques that five years ago, would be far too costly for the majority of organisations.
A successful transition to a DR/BC site ultimately depends and is linked to the disaster recovery plan. The ‘plan’ should interface with the overall business continuity management plan, be clear and concise, focus on the key activities required to recover the critical IT services, be tested reviewed and updated on a regular basis, have an owner, and enable the recovery objectives to be met.
The key objective of a disaster recovery plan is to detail the key activities required to reinstate the critical IT services within the agreed recovery objectives. The most effective start point for any DR plan is the ‘declaration of a disaster’ once an incident has been deemed serious enough that ‘forward fixing’ at the primary location is impractical or is likely to result in an outage expending beyond the maximum tolerable outage.
In order to get it right first time, there are a number of considerations that an organisation should focus on to ensure a smooth transition, for example, what level of detail should the plan contain and also what information should the disaster recovery plan contain? This last point is critical because if there is a need to transition services the DR/BC site, then that isn’t the time to discover that important, critical processes have been missed out from the plan.
About
Allen Mitchel is a Senior Technical Account Manager, MENA, CommVault Systems. He has a proven track record of over 20 years in the industry. Hi experience includes over 14 years of focus on Data and Information Management issues and solutions for enterprise businesses.
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