In any disaster that involves some kind of destruction (and are there any disasters that don’t?), there’s going to be some kind of debris. Complete disaster recovery means dealing effectively with that debris. The FEMA (American Federal Emergency Management Agency) 325 Debris Management Guide published in 2007 indicates the potential size of the problem: over…
If you’re involved in disaster recovery planning at an international level, you may well find disparities in the different country branches of your organisation. Differences can arise in a number of ways. They can range from simple lack of knowledge of what disaster recovery is or should be, through time lags where different countries are…
Tape storage of information sometimes has an image of being out-dated, outmoded and out-performed by disk storage. That’s true enough – in the living room of your home, where audio cassettes and the VHS system for video cassettes are now antiques compared to CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray media. However, a living room is not a…
What does “disaster” mean to you, in the context of a disaster recovery template? Explosion, storm, power outage? The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has an interesting take on this in its “Emergency Management Guide for Business & Industry”. Not only does it also list “loss of key supplier or customer” in its sample list…
MTO and RTO are integral parts of disaster recovery planning, but they can also be used outside of that context. To recap on their definitions, MTO (Maximum Tolerable Outage) is the maximum amount of time that a process or facility can be unavailable before significant disruption and/or financial loss occurs to an organisation. RTO (Recovery…
A couple of interesting cases came up recently about differences in cloud backup services, and the effect that this might have on MTO and RTO. As a reminder, maximum tolerable outage (MTO) is the maximum time you or your organisation can afford to be without a given system or resource; recovery time objective (RTO) is…