Decommissioning is Part of Disaster Recovery Planning
More moving parts mean more chance of failure. Replace “moving parts” by “comatose IT servers” and the adage still holds true.
Time to Get Your Disaster Recovery Plan Straight?
Time is money, as they say, and it is also a key factor in IT disaster recovery. Take, for instance, the well-known recovery time objective or RTO, which defines how fast you should get back to normal operations after an IT incident.
Extending to Long Range Disaster Recovery Planning
People go to their “panic stations” (or rather, their designated disaster recovery roles!) to contain and repair the damage.
Five Aspects of Usability to Integrate into Your Disaster Recovery Planning
Disaster recovery planning for your IT installations may use automated procedures for a number of situations. Virtual machines can often be switched or re-started in case of server failure, and network communications can be rerouted without human intervention. For other requirements, people will be involved in getting IT systems up and running properly after an…
Disaster Recovery and the Darker Side of the ‘Undo’ Function
There are times when you wish you could undo what you just did. Sometimes, you can’t. Financial investments, office reorganisations and even that too-hasty email you sent often cannot simply be reversed. With IT on the other hand, it’s a different story. From individual PCs to corporate data centres, the ‘Undo’ function has become a…
Disaster Recovery – the Truth is Out There
There are statistics, there is business folklore and there are facts about disaster recovery. Some of the statistics quoted may not always be easy to trace back to their source, but it remains a fact that to stay in business, you need to be able to do business. That’s why good disaster recovery planning and…
Virtualisation at the Heart of a Health Provider’s Disaster Recovery Planning
A recent article on the website ZDNet.com describes how a health provider in Indiana, US, put in place IT virtualisation to manage a number of challenges, including disaster recovery planning. One of the big changes was moving from a situation where a breakdown in a physical server threatened the welfare of hundreds of individuals, to…
Data Destruction, the Flip Side of Disaster Recovery Planning
With the emphasis in disaster recovery planning on safeguarding and restoring data, it may sound strange to talk about deliberate data destruction. After all, isn’t that the exact opposite of what DR teams in businesses are trying to achieve? However, like the yin and the yang of the universe, destroying data is a natural counterpart…
International Disaster Recovery Planning Disparities
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…
What’s the Difference between Crisis Management and Disaster Recovery Planning?
What’s in a word? With the multiple definitions of disaster recovery planning already in existence, here comes crisis management as well. Example: let’s say your whole data centre crashes because of a faulty power supply configuration, leaving you with no sales and no customer support, and your IT staff threatens to walk out because of…
Human Beings in the Disaster Recovery Equation
Ever since Frederick Taylor’s ideas on system engineering were shown to have a fundamental lack of appreciation of the human factor, businesses have been coming to terms with the messiness and at the same time the potential of human beings in the disaster recovery process. Taylor’s precept was that workers were too stupid to understand…
MTO, RTO… How about MTD (Maximum Tolerable Degradation)?
We’re sometimes all too easily impressed by a few acronyms, like MTO, RTO and others in business continuity. It’s easy enough to find out what they mean, either from this site or elsewhere, but the real issue is whether that’s the point. Let’s explain. MTO stands for maximum tolerable outage, and RTO is for recovery…