DISASTER RECOVERY: PLANNING AHEAD FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY

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1 DISASTER RECOVERY: PLANNING AHEAD FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY OCTOBER 2012 Sponsored by Contingency planning for IT is a step businesses should take to ensure continuity and production in a state of emergency. Read on to find out how to lay a foundation and begin Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 0 your Disaster Recovery efforts for IT.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2 BCDR CONSIDERATIONS 3 RUNNING TESTS 3 MEASUREMENTS TO CONSIDER 3 PRIORITIZING DATA AND APPLICATIONS: TIERED STORAGE 3 TRADITIONAL DR 4 TAPE 4 COLOCATION/HOT SITE 4 DR IN THE CLOUD 5 DISASTER-RECOVERY-AS-A-SERVICE (DRaaS) 5 HOSTING.COM CLOUD REPLICATION 6 CONCLUSION 7 ABOUT 7 HOSTING.COM 7 CLOUD SPECTATOR 7 Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 1

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) in today s world is more complex than simply backing up data to tapes on a weekly or monthly basis. For small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), 24 hours of downtime cost roughly $12,500 in Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) in today s world is more complex than simply backing up data to tapes on a weekly or monthly basis. With the growing dependency on IT, downtime can hurt businesses internally by halting productivity, and externally by cutting customers from purchase. Costs can easily stack up; in fact, for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), 24 hours of downtime cost roughly $12,500 in Though backup storage is one side of the disaster recovery (DR) effort, today s businesses should consider replicated servers for failover, especially with mission-critical applications. In a business crisis, efficient and stable DR can assure continuity and prevent data loss, avoiding those similar costs for your business. A complete DR plan requires a commitment to continuous testing and optimizing to minimize downtime; this document can help you formulate the plan. HOW TO USE THIS PAPER There are many great BCDR guides available; this is not one of them. BCDR planning requires an investment in research, planning, and testing, and the scale of complexity increases with the size and dependency on the IT department. This paper is, instead, a powerful resource in your research phase: we take a look at what you should think about when creating your BCDR plan, and introduce you to the available options for backup and redundancy. The paper is divided accordingly: BCDR CONSIDERATIONS Key Takeaway: running tests to measure the effectiveness of your DR plan. We begin by presenting an introduction into DR to build a basic understanding for your available options. This includes a brief look into testing, factors that should be measured when running tests, and prioritization of data for an effective recovery. TRADITIONAL DR Key Takeaway: traditional DR options carry strengths and weaknesses that should be considered in your business s needs. We break up DR options between traditional and cloud. Taking a look at traditional DR options available for IT, we weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each: tape backups and colocation (also called a hot spot). DR IN THE CLOUD Key Takeaway: cloud technology revolutionizes DR planning by putting an affordable, scalable, and powerful option on the table. Using Hosting.com s Cloud Replication as an example, we examine disaster recovery leveraging cloud technology. Find out if cloud DR is right for your business. ABOUT CLOUD SPECTATOR AND HOSTING.COM If you find our report helpful, learn more about us and our report sponsor, Hosting.com, in this section. You can find contact information here as well. 1 Symantec 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 2

4 An effective DR plan does not significantly cut into your business s time and/or revenue, allowing periodic DR testing simulations. Testing will better ensure that, in a state of actual emergency, the DR plan is functional and reliable. BCDR CONSIDERATIONS RUNNING TESTS Periodic tests simulating a DR emergency will ensure a functional and reliable plan; however, up to 40% 2 of tests don t meet set goals, and up to 25% 3 actually fail. Inadequate testing can also directly influence data loss after a disaster. Failure to run simulations and reevaluate test parameters can increase the likelihood of a DR failure. Businesses that lose their stored data or accessibility to that data can face irreparable consequences. After experiencing a disaster, up to 43% of businesses fail, while 29% close within 2 years of the outage 2. On a broader scale, 93% percent of businesses that had lost their data center for 10 days went bankrupt within one year 3. MEASUREMENTS TO CONSIDER The tests must achieve a set objective, whether it is a full recovery or continuity of missioncritical applications. By setting the Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective, you measure and acknowledge the criticality of your data: The RPO is represented by the amount of data that a business can afford to lose. Businesses that cannot afford to lose data have a low RPO and more frequent backups. The RTO is the maximum amount of time that a system can be down after a disaster. For a business that processes many thousands of transactions in a short period of time, such as a financial institution or online marketplace, the RTO must be kept low to avoid the loss of revenue. PRIORITIZING DATA AND APPLICATIONS: TIERED STORAGE In tiered storage, data and applications are recovered on a priority basis; critical applications and databases are given precedence when replicating data. Prioritizing the recovery of applications and data allows you to maintain basic stability in the event of a disaster. For most businesses, 60% of applications are deemed mission critical. Below are three tiers to help you in prioritizing the importance of your data and applications: TIER 1 Mission critical data and applications that are essential for running the business. EXAMPLE: The ticket booking system for an airline. TIER 2 Data and applications that are important for maintaining normal business operations. These typically require high availability and high performance, but are not mission critical. EXAMPLE: The billing application and data for a cloud service provider. TIER 3 Data that is rarely accessed, such as archived or static data. Performance and availability isn t a priority, but the data needs to be retrievable. EXAMPLE: Archived newspaper articles in the marketing department. 2 McGladrey and Pullen 3 National Archives and Records Administration Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 3

5 TRADITIONAL DR Traditional disaster recovery methods are ideal for some businesses, but not for all. Traditional low-cost disaster recovery plans may be unreliable or fail to meet compliance mandates for specific industries and businesses. Methods like tape or disk backups may require manual recovery. For multiple data centers, the configuration of physical backups and replication between different geographical sites can be complex and typically requires solid expertise and process-based coordination. Traditional DR methods are reasonable for some businesses, but not for all. In traditional DR, businesses plan for additional data backup resources to supplement hardware needs for new primary systems. As a result, when purchasing new hardware, IT managers include additional hardware resources for the purpose of backup, which can be expensive. With traditional DR, failover can be costly as well, particularly if the failover is not successful (e.g., up to 71% of tape-based DR contains failures 4 ). With colocation, maintaining the recovery environment requires high capital expenditure and skilled IT personnel, which is typically costprohibitive for smaller enterprises. Traditional low-cost DR plans may be unreliable or fail to meet compliance mandates for specific industries and businesses. Methods like tape or disk backups need manual recovery, which require more time. For multiple data centers, the configuration of physical backups and replication between geographical sites can be complex and typically requires solid expertise and process-based coordination. Below, we examine two common DR methods: tape and colocation. TAPE Main benefit: Low cost; businesses dedicate less capital for a tape-based DR strategy. The most common storage medium has been magnetic tape, which has been around for decades and fundamentally remains the same. Data is recorded onto the tape in a linear process and the cartridges are physically stored and secured afterwards. A main disadvantage of magnetic tape is the sluggish recovery time. RTO with magnetic tape are at a minimum of a few days. Recovery requires the disk to be manually retrieved from the secure site. Most businesses would find it unacceptable to have their data inaccessible for that amount of time. Tapes also back up data sequentially as it is written; during a failover it is impossible to prioritize data restoration with tape. Magnetic tape also has reliability concerns, as up to 71% of tape-based system restorations contain failures 6. Even if there are only a few small mistakes, a single misplaced decimal point could require substantial capital to correct. COLOCATION/HOT SITE Main benefits: Control over the backup servers. Fast RTO; if set up properly, businesses can expect a near-instant RTO. The use of colocation/hot site is another traditional DR strategy. A business maintains and upgrades a secondary data center to serve as a backup site in addition to their production site. The main benefit for companies is the overall control over the servers; the standby location can be firmly controlled and optimized for DR. The main drawback of choosing colocation as a disaster recovery option is the significant cost of maintaining an entire data center. Businesses must make a capital investment for the site and infrastructure, and employ skilled staff for maintenance and upkeep. 4 EVault 12 Best Practices for Data Backup and Recovery 2011 Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 4

6 DR IN THE CLOUD Main benefits: Low cost, redundant, and instant RTO DRaaS is for businesses that wish to maintain control over their production environment but seek an extra lifeline for their data. With DRaaS, businesses virtualize their entire environments within the cloud, alongside the current systems and hardware. As a result, businesses avoid expensive construction and maintenance of hardware, using the DRaaS services for successful and inexpensive disaster recovery. The cloud is revolutionizing the way IT operates across all industries, offering a pay-per-use model and geographical and server redundancy, which also changes the DR landscape. According to Hosting.com, in comparison to traditional backup methods like tape, cloud can reduce recovery time by up to 4x. Needless to say, advantages are rooted in the reduction of costs and maximization of uptime. A cloud-based DR option offers smaller enterprises an inexpensive yet undisruptive testing environment. Automation allows the execution of customized tests with extra callouts and breakpoints within an isolated test environment. As such, companies can quickly identify and remediate potential issues before they occur. Creating backup images of the data on virtual machines (VMs) greatly simplifies recovery. Compressing an entire system file as a VM ensures fast recovery. In comparison, a bare metal recovery would require time for sourcing replacement hardware, reconfiguring the new hardware, and reinstalling the operating system and necessary applications. The automated recovery in a cloud is significantly faster than a manual restart and minimizes human error. Essentially, a cloud environment supports the foundation of a secure and affordable DR plan. DISASTER-RECOVERY-AS-A-SERVICE (DRaaS) DRaaS is for businesses that want to maintain control over their production environment but seek an extra lifeline for their data, choosing a secondary cloud environment to support their existing infrastructure. With DRaaS, businesses virtualize their entire environment within the cloud alongside the current systems and hardware. As a result, businesses avoid expensive construction and maintenance of hardware, using the DRaaS services for successful and inexpensive disaster recovery. The construction of an entire data center for backup and DR is not a cost effective option. By contrast, the services provided by DRaaS are comprehensive and less expensive, and also provide tools that identify usage of resources. Customers can leverage infrastructure across multiple geographic locations, depending on the size of the cloud provider and their respective placement of provisioned servers and hardware. Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 5

7 HOSTING.COM CLOUD REPLICATION Hosting.com Cloud Replication continuously transfers data to a cloud environment at a Hosting.com data center. The average RTO per failover for businesses was at 20.4 hours in 2010; in contrast, depending on the size of recovery, RTO can take less than one hour with Cloud Replication. Cloud Replication continuously replicates data to a cloud environment at a Hosting.com data center. VMs are replicated from their on-premises counterparts at the customer data center or on the Hosting.com cloud, providing an identical system that is booted in the event of a disaster. Hosting.com allows replication of data to be set by the customer. Those replications can be set to run automatically or temporarily based on their needs. Hosting.com s IT administrators manage the environment during normal operations, as well during failover and post-failover activities. Through the enhanced Hosting.com Customer Portal, customers can highlight specific VMs and link them to data centers. By using a tiered failover, businesses can prioritize their VMs, ensuring that mission critical systems are reactivated first. From the Customer Portal, customers have multiple recovery-plan options, and can combine strategies and recovery options to create a customized and multi-faceted approach to DR. Through the Portal, customers can also run real-time tests and recall archived data from previous tests. Because tests do not disturb any operations, customers can administer monthly tests while simultaneously installing patches and updates. Other features include: monitoring VM protection statuses, analyzing reports from previous tests/failovers, and the provision of immediate access to their systems during a disaster. system state of VM s at both locations is identical. Hosting.com is partnered with VMWare to use their Site Recovery Manager 5 (SRM) to maintain copies of the virtual machines at the customer s production site. The machines are then replicated to the Hosting.com site so that the The average RTO per failover for businesses was at 20.4 hours in In contrast, depending on the size of recovery, RTO can take less than one hour with Cloud Replication. Moreover, Hosting.com offers RPO options of 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours; allowing customer choice based on time or budget constraints. Cloud Replication provides a cost effective, fast and efficient option for business continuity that s simple and reliable. Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 6

8 CONCLUSION Today, businesses of all sizes rely more on technology in their daily operations. In this trend, high availability is spotlighted, meaning that IT systems must be continuously operational, even in the event of a disaster. As server hardware and storage systems have become central to a business s identity and functionality, effective BCDR strategies must be implemented to support newer, more complex IT environments. Cloud computing offers the most cost-efficient and dependable option for processing and storing data. Compared to traditional methods for BCDR, the cloud is more reliable, available, and affordable. Cloud Replication from Hosting.com gives businesses peace of mind when it comes to the safety and security of their data. Hosting.com makes it easy to configure, monitor, and manage your BCDR in the cloud. ABOUT HOSTING.COM Hosting.com is a provider of a leading enterprise class cloud platform with a focus on high availability, recovery capability, speed of provisioning, and cost alignment. The company owns and operates 6 geographically spaced data centers including Newark, DE, Denver, CO, Irvine, CA, Louisville, KY, Dallas, TX and San Francisco, CA. Using the industry s top networking and connectivity technologies, the company has a strong internal control structure with independent evaluation for compliance against PCI DSS and SOC (formally SAS-70) frameworks. All products and services are supported 24/7 by live expert technical support. Website: Contact Number: CLOUD SPECTATOR Cloud Spectator provides vital data and analytics into the cloud computing industry to help businesses make informed decisions about selecting cloud providers, and to help cloud providers understand their position in the marketplace. Focused on hard data, the company measures cloud server performance, compares pricing across many cloud providers, and delivers data-driven insight into the industry. Website: Contact Number: Copyright 2012 Cloud Spectator. Cloud Replication is a trademark of Hosting.com. Other names or marks mentioned may be trademarks of their respective companies. Disaster Recovery: Planning Ahead for Business Continuity 7