E x E c u t i v E B r i E f IT Innovation. Business Value. 4 Stages of IT Disaster Recovery Planning Are You Resilient?

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1 IT Innovation. Business Value. 4 Stages of IT Disaster Recovery Planning Are You Resilient? As the enterprise IT landscape becomes more complex, customers more demanding, and computing devices more abundant and powerful, the need for business resiliency is of critical importance. Resilience is the ability for a company to adapt and recover from any unplanned changes to the IT environment by managing risk and implementing contingency and continuity planning. Companies develop disaster recovery plans to ensure that they have a documented, detailed, tested blueprint for directing the IT recovery process in the event of a man-made or natural disaster. In general, a disaster is defined as any event that causes sufficient interruption of computer operations that the decision is made to move those operations to an off-site recovery location. Disaster recovery plans are designed to restore the company s applications, data, and physical network within established critical timeframes that minimize the impact on the business, with respect to lost revenue and operational interference. Furthermore, disaster recovery planning is also critical to ensure compliance with mandatory business regulations regulations that have penalties for noncompliance ranging from monetary fines to loss of business. Secure-24 is a leading provider of managed IT operations, hosting and cloud services, providing highly available IT environments and expert management and support for your business Northwestern Highway, Southfield, MI Phone: info@secure-24.com

2 4 Stages of Planning Developing an effective disaster recovery plan involves more than backing up to tape there are seven distinct, critical steps that must be performed: Access Develop and architect your recovery strategies Define the recovery team organization, identify key individuals, and provide training Develop and document the procedures that will be executed in the event of a disaster Test Test and validate to confirm that activities outlined in a DR plan will be successful and that RTO/RPO objective can be satisfied. It is important to establish a testing frequency and monitoring to verify that your DR plan remains effective. Design Develop and architect your recovery strategies Define the recovery team organization, identify key individuals, and provide training Develop and document the procedures that will be executed in the event of a disaster MAINTeNANCe Because business process and IT system change over time, disaster recovery plans should undergo scheduled reviews to identify potential sources of change such as to key staff attrition, new compliance requirements or changes to critical RTO/RTP levels. For the Disaster Recovery Plan to be viable and effective, it is critical that a methodology be followed from identifying applications used throughout the enterprise, to reviewing and testing the plan on a regular basis. As infrastructure updates and new software applications are implemented in the enterprise, the plan must be revised to reflect these innovations. There also needs to be consensus from the management team on both the critical business definitions and the role that management will play in executing the plan. p a g e 2 o f 6

3 Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Performing a careful and complete Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is critical to developing an effective Disaster Recovery Plan. During this phase, system requirements, functions, and interdependencies are analyzed the results are then used to identify system contingencies as well as setting priorities. The Business Impact Analysis drives the Disaster Recovery Plan by identifying the applications and systems that will significantly impact the business in the event of a disaster. During this phase, it is vital that input be obtained from departments across the enterprise, from Human Resources and Customer Service, to Information Technology and Accounting. In addition to using this information gathering to define critical timeframe, the BIA is also an effective strategy to educate the enterprise on the need for a Disaster Recovery Plan and to identify any alternative manual procedures that could potentially minimize the impact of an interruption in system availability. Defining RPO and RTO Critical to BIA is determining the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The RPO is the point in time to which data must be recovered; the RTO is the overall length of time an IT component can be in recovery before it negatively impacts critical business processes. The analysis is important because different applications and IT components will have different RPOs and RTOs. For example, an application that supports a mission-critical application, such as customer order processing, may have a short RPO/RTO, while an application that runs an internal, non-customerfacing of low import may have a much longer RPO/RTO. p a g e 3 o f 6

4 Architecting Your Recovery Strategies Developing a solid Disaster Recovery strategy requires a comprehensive approach. Key items that need to be considered include network requirements, infrastructure needs, data recovery, data and record management, security and compliance. DATA Recovery Models Tape Disk2disk Asynchronous Replication Snapshot CDP Local Mirroring Synchronous Replication Multi-Data Center Mirroring After the critical applications and data recovery objectives are identified, the company needs to architect the specific strategies and solutions to make sure the recovery objectives for applications, network and data are restored in the appropriate timeframes. Meeting these recovery objectives may involve deploying new architecture, tools, and infrastructure internally or with the assistance of an external service provider. Options to be considered include electronic vaulting, tape retention, or a dual data center approach. Testing and Training Performing thorough analysis and developing sound recovery strategies are critical to a solid Disaster Recovery Plan; however, testing the plan and training staff on executing the plan is vital to successful DR planning. The only way to validate that your plan will work is to test the plan on a regular basis and put a function in place to ensure it is updated to reflect changes in the environment. There are various levels of testing, with varying degrees of involvement from a structured walkthrough with key technical resources verbally assessing the plan, to simulation testing where a disaster is simulated so the plan can be implemented, to full interruption testing, in which the disaster recovery plan is activated in total. The organization needs to establish the testing required to effectively assess the validity of the plan. In tandem with testing the plan is the need to train assigned personnel both on their roles in the disaster recovery scenario and on the broader content of the plan itself. Like testing, the organization needs to regularly revisit the training plan to address the organizational changes, new hires, and attrition that are inevitable. p a g e 4 o f 6

5 Secure-24 DR Solutions Secure-24 runs customer operations from data centers connected via a highavailability SONET ring. This multi-data center approach enhances the ability to recover quickly because one facility acts as backup recovery for the other. Not only is there complete redundancy for the components within the data center, but the data centers themselves are redundant. Secure-24 s disaster recovery services for hosting and private cloud customers include an in-depth analysis of our customers current IT infrastructure, as well as the critical data and applications, including: Detailed assessment and definition of risks, timeframes, required performance, and functionality levels supported by well defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) Implementation, ongoing management, and solution support Synchronous and asynchronous disaster recovery offerings Disk-to-disk plus additional tape backup options Dual-data center approach with unique Geographic High-Availability (GHA) internet fiber connection between data centers Highly experienced and knowledgeable teams to restore systems and minimize business impact Command center facilities that allow key personnel to continue operations in the event of an emergency SONET Connectivity Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) p a g e 5 o f 6

6 About Secure-24 To learn more about how outsourcing your applications and infrastructure to Secure-24 can help your organization achieve its business goals, contact us at: As a leading provider of managed IT operations, Enterprise Hosting and Cloud Computing Services, Secure-24 delivers full technical support of business critical applications with proven methodology and demonstrated successes in infrastructure, management, upgrades, migrations and support engagements. Secure-24 manages complex IT landscapes for mid-market and large companies that operate globally, providing robust, strategic and transformative technologies that help organizations to be innovative and competitive. Secure Northwestern Highway Southfield, MI Local: Toll-Free: Fax: Info: info@secure-24.com Sales: sales@secure-24.com HR: HR@secure-24.com Secure-24 is committed to helping your organization succeed by bringing the best innovations and technology to your IT needs. That s why we have developed strategic relationships with market-leading business and technology companies and emerging players. Working closely with our network of alliance partners strengthens our ability to deliver genuine business value to the enterprise and help clients make the most of their IT investments. p a g e 6 o f 6