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Disaster Recovery
What is a disaster
What is
disaster recovery
What are the consequences of not having a disaster
plan.
The
Golden rule
How will a disaster recovery plan help us
OK we may need a disaster recovery plan, what next
What is a disaster
There are three
main types of disaster and these are shown below:-
-
Natural Disaster (Wind,
Fire, Rain, Flood)
-
Accidental
(Hardware/software errors, loss of power,
telecoms failures)
-
Malicious (staff
vandalism, burglary, viruses, cyber attack)
We have found
that generally people will focus on the first
category yet as you will see from statistics
shown below the majority of disasters relate to
the accidental and malicious categories which
means that the highest causes of disasters are
not generally considered and planned for.
What is disaster
recovery
Below is an excerpt from the the
Wikipedia definition for disaster
recovery:-
"Disaster
recovery is the process of regaining
access to the data, hardware and
software necessary to resume
critical business operations after a
natural or human-induced disaster. A
disaster recovery plan (DRP) is part
of a larger process known as
business continuity planning (BCP)."
In reality the concept is very
simple yet the majority of small and
medium sizes business's will not
have any form of DRP let alone a BCP.
What are the consequences of not
having a disaster plan.
Nearly all companies rely upon
information that is stored on their
computers whether it be letters,
spreadsheets or emails which in turn
puts your business at risk in the
event that this information is lost.
To put this into context if you
search the web you can find various
statistics relating to the effect of
a disaster on a business and to save
you searching, below is a few of the
more disturbing ones:-
-
Over 80% of companies who
suffer a disaster can expect to go out of
business within 18 months as a consequence.
(Source - Survive)
-
The survival rate for
companies without a disaster recovery plan is
less than 10% (Source - Touche Ross)
-
70% of all successful attacks
on computer networks, many of which were
accidental, were carried out by
employees/insiders (Source - IDC)
The above
statistics highlight what can happen if you loose
everything and have no form of backup. In
reality if you have a backup then it will always be
possible to restore your data and get your business
back on track given the right amount of time effort
and money.
The list below
shows some or all of the effects a disaster can have
on your business:-
-
Loss of business/customers
-
Loss of credibility/goodwill
-
Cash flow problems
-
Degradation of service to
customers
-
Inability to pay staff
-
Loss of production
-
Loss of operational data
-
Financial loss
-
Loss of financial control
-
Loss of customer account
management.
The golden rule
Its simple
really. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.
Even if you don't
have a DRP but you have a backup of all your data
then your system can be recovered and your business
is not going to become one of the statistics and go
under.
When deciding on
a backup system you need to consider the amount of
data you need to back up now, what it may grow to in
the next 3 years, and how far back in time you may
wish to restore to as there is no point in only
having 5 tapes and rotating them each week only to
find that one of your users wants to restore
something that they haven't used since last month
and have only just found out that it is lost or
corrupted as it will no longer be on the backup
tapes.
Below is a list
of the ways in which you can backup and our
observations regarding each:-
Tapes
This is still in our opinion the
best way to backup your data as they are fast, can
be set to run automatically over night, are a tried
and tested technology, media is small and easy to
take offsite, media is relatively cheap, media has a
very long life span,
Optical media such as
CD's/DVD's
Optical disks are ideal for
taking a point in time backup of a piece of data but
they require far more human interaction than a tape
which will often lead to backups being forgotten.
CD's can store about 700Mb with DVD's storing about
4GB of data which these days is not normally enough
to back up all of the information held on a
companies network.
USB hard drives
This covers anything from a USB
memory stick up to external USB hard drives.
With the price of hard drives coming down and sizes
ever increasing these have become an easy and cost
effective way of backing up all of your network
information. The down side of these devices is
that Memory sticks that are truly portable do not
have the capacity required and external hard drives
that do have the capacity are not as portable as a
tape which means that users are less likely to want
to take it off site with them. The main down
side to the external hard drives is that they are
not robust enough to be taken in and out of the
office all the time as regardless of the
improvements in hard drive reliability they still
fail regularly and if you drop one that is pretty
much the end of it
Network attached hard drives
NAS box's are great for providing
on line backup and archiving but they are not
designed to be taken to and from site and thus they
are not suitable as the main source of backup
Offsite backup
This is the nearest competitor to
tapes as it can be automated to run overnight,
requires very little human interaction and by its
very nature the backup is offsite and thus safe from
a localised disaster. So if this is so good
then why do we still recommend tapes? With an
offsite backup you pay for the space that you use on
someone's server and this will normally equate to a
few pounds per gigabyte per month which if you have
60GB of data then this is going to cost you £120 per
month and is only going to grow. Other
concerns relate to the amount of time it can take to
backup/restore large amounts of data over a
broadband connection and the time it can take to
have the data delivered back to you from the storage
site (normally in London) as upon being asked they
will need to copy the data and then courier it to
you which may or may not be an issue depending on
your planned recovery time scale but lets face it a
tape is going to be available much more quickly.
In reality as
prices come down and internet speeds go up Offsite
backup is becoming more attractive and indeed we
actively recommend that people use Offsite backup
along side tapes for their critical information such
as accounts etc.
Once you have a
backup system you absolutely have to check it on a
daily basis as we have so often seen situations
where a customer contacts us and asks us to restore
a file from last week only to find that the backup
has not run properly for a month. The
alternative to this is to take out a
managed service
with us as we are able to provide monitoring which
will remove the need for you or your staff to take
responsibility for this and will allow us to check
on a daily basis that all is OK with your backup and
many other aspects of your network.
How will a disaster recovery plan help us
You may be
wondering why you need a DRP if you have a backup?
The answer is that by having a DRP it is possible to
proactively reduce the time, effort and money that
would be required to restore your network to full
operation.
If you are not
particularly concerned about how long it is going to
take to get your IT backup and running then a DRP
may not be required but there are very few companies
these days that fit into that category and thus you
need to ask yourself how much money are we loosing
for every hour and every day that we are unable to
carry out our business? It is the answer to
this question that will give you a good idea of how
a DRP is going to help as if you calculate that each
day you are unable to work looses/costs you £10000
then any pre planning that is going to reduce the
amount of down time can be directly equated to this
figure and a potential saving calculated.
If we take the
example of your server being stolen simply having a
backup is not going to help as there is no machine
to restore the data onto. This is a scenario
that we have had to deal with before and is also the
one that is most likely to come up as any natural
disaster is likely to have the same effect of
rendering the server unavailable to restore to.
When asked how
long it would take us to get a customer back up an
running in the event of a server theft we quote
about 5 days to achieve 90% of the pre disaster
efficiency with the final (non critical) issues
being teethed out over the next couple of weeks as
they arise. This figure is broken down as follows:-
Day one we
receive a call at 9am informing us that the server
has been stolen and within an hour or so we will
have someone onsite to assess the situation.
During the meeting we will discuss the options and
then set about gathering the required installation
disks and paper work. This is often a problem
if everything has not been pre sorted out and will
often hold us up and make the job more difficult.
The next stage is
to order the parts for the new server which we can
generally source next day but due to availability
will often mean that we need to opt for alternative
equipment which is likely to be more expensive as
you cant opt for something less powerful than you
had.
Even with a pre
10am delivery time we cant start building until the
following day and it is then going to take us 4 or
more hours to build and install the server (we cant
hurry up the speed of software installing and it
takes a lot of time to install all of the service
packs and updates that are required before you can
move onto the next part of the install).
In effect what
this means is that from getting the call to
the point of being able to start restoring data
you are looking at two days. At the beginning
of the 3rd day we should be in a position to deliver
the server to the office and configure each machine
onto the new server. At this point if we don't
have full records of how the original server was
setup then it is unlikely that we will have matched
the new server settings exactly which means that
each machine is going to have to be configure to the
server from scratch which is going to waste more
time. Depending on the number of machines at
the office we should have them all configured to the
new server by the end of day 3 and would expect to
have most of the general data restored.
Towards the end of day 3 and into day 4 we would
configure email to send and receive new emails and
we would then restore all of the old email.
The rest of day 4 and 5 would be taken up with
snagging the normal issues that arise with the
installation of a new server.
If you had worked
out that each lost day would cost £10000 then the
first 3 days would effectively be 100% loss giving a
total of £30000 and days 4 and 5 would be
interrupted and could thus equate to another £10000
of loss giving a total of £40000.
Given these
figures we would recommend buying a spare server
that was already pre configured with all of the
software and a backup drive and the creation of a
DRP that includes the safe storage of installation
disks notes on required network settings and a
detailed plan of what will be done so that any
engineer is able to come in and deal with the
situation. By having a spare server and a
written DRP we would be able to knock a minimum of 2
days from the recovery time and the actual process
would be more efficient with key areas being brought
on line first of all rather than simply doing jobs
as they presented themselves.
Based on the
figures discussed it is likely that having a spare
server and DRP would save £20000 to £25000.
This figure has to be balanced against the cost of
buying a spare server and creating the DRP and to
give an estimate based on other jobs you would be
looking at spending between £3000 and £5000.
OK we may need a disaster recovery plan, what next.
The first thing
to do is look at this from your own perspective and
to decide what effect a disaster would have on your
business. If the answer you come back with is
not a lot then simply make sure your backups are
working properly and sleep soundly at night.
If when you look at your business you feel that
having a disaster recovery plan in place is
something that really is needed then why not give us
a call or send an email and we will be happy to come
in and discuss your particular requirements further
and should you wish we will produce a quote for any
work that is required.
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