Although often overlooked, business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning need to be considered and implemented now more than ever before. The tragic events of September 11 and the possibility of additional random acts, natural or man-made, bring to light that now is the time to look at how you would handle a major business interruption event; in particular how you would restore your company’s core business computing operations.
There are two problems with computer operations disaster recovery planning. One is cost and the other is determining for which disaster scenario to create a plan. However, in spite of these difficulties, there are relatively simple and inexpensive things that you can do to prepare and plan for business disruptions. The key is to put some thought and time into the disaster recovery planning process and to try and develop realistic, implementable plans. Banks and other financial institutions typically already have well thought out recovery plans, simply because of the nature of their business, but many other companies don’t have any disaster recovery plans. A recent survey by a major business publication showed that 30 percent of companies don’t even store backups of their computer data in off-site locations.
Simple and inexpensive disaster recovery considerations
• Offsite backups of computer data. One of the most important things to do is to protect your business data. This is simple, cheap and easy to implement. Make backup tapes of your computer data and store those tapes off-site at bank vaults or at other locations. This should be done on a regular schedule, at least once every week. Also determine how you can retrieve those backup tapes on weekends or after hours, should the need arise.
• An emergency recovery team. Develop a core team of employees who will function as the emergency recovery team. Although all your employees will contribute to the successful resumption of business, the core team will coordinate and facilitate the first response.
• An employee communications plan. Make sure that you have full contact information (home phone numbers, cell phone numbers, email addresses, instant messaging addresses and pager numbers) for your employees and the preferred method and process for communicating with them at a time of crisis.
• A temporary business location. Determine and select a temporary location from which to do business in the event that your business location is destroyed or inaccessible.
Sophisticated and more costly disaster recovery considerations
• Contract with a data center hot-site or cold-site. Depending on your business, the amount of time that you can afford to have your computer systems unavailable, and the amount of money that you can afford to invest in disaster preparedness, a data center hot-site subscription is one of the best ways to assure relatively quick recovery of computer systems operations. A hot-site is a computer center, usually located in a different geographical area, that has the same hardware, software and communications capabilities already installed and ready to be utilized on short notice.
A cold-site is a location that has the power, some communications, and space for staff and equipment, but doesn’t have computer equipment already installed. It’s basically a shell that is ready to be populated with your computer systems and staff to operate them. A cold-site is much less expensive than a hot-site; however, it will take much longer to become operational.
• Locate your core business computing equipment at a secure data center. Instead of locating your host computers within your own offices or facilities, where they are subject to security and power failures, they can instead be located at secure data centers. High-speed data circuits then link your end-user’s PCs to the host computers at the data center. Here in Hawaii , Pihana Pacific and NetEnterprise provide secure, well-equipped data center facilities. Pihana’s state-of-the-art facility was designed from the ground up to be a world-class data center and even has its own power generator and fuel source that can run the entire facility for a number of days.
In addition to the items listed here, there are numerous other disaster recovery methods and techniques that should be carefully considered prior to formulating a recovery plan. After a plan is established, it should be tested periodically to assure its effectiveness.
Computer operations disaster recovery planning is no longer a task relegated to the back burner. Planning and anticipating some level of recovery is extremely important. In the event of a business interruption, it could mean the difference between chaos and at least some level of business continuity. |
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