Tag Archives: catastrophic event

08.28.15
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Understand How Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Interrelate

Understanding the importance of Disaster Recovery within a Business Continuity plan has become more important as data types and regulatory requirements have become more complex.

To begin, the difference of disaster recovery and business continuity must be understood. Both disciplines describe a company’s preparation for the mitigation of risks to continued operations. Disaster recovery applies to the technology operations of the business. Whereas, business continuity has a larger scope that includes technology, physical assets and manual business processes such as workflow, customer service and more. As stated in the StandBy article BCP vs DRP “A mistake often made by organisations is that ‘we have an IT DR Plan, we are all ok“.  That is not the case.  You need to have a Business Continuity Plan in place for critical personnel, key business processes, recovery of vital records, critical suppliers identification, contacting of key vendors and clients etc.”

Developing business continuity planThe complexity of these plans has increased along with their importance. For the disaster recovery plan, regulation has added a level of sophistication that was not required as it is today. Data backup and recovery strategies must meet company policies regarding regulatory requirements, data breaches, ability to respond to court orders, and more.

There are real life situations that require the ability to “look back in time”. Consider that data is not only required to be backed up for protection of a catastrophic event, but, it also needs to be restored in different ways for different purposes and meet varying requirements. A request can be made from a government regulatory body to retrieve data from a certain date or from a past event. This requires coordinated strategies and testing to ensure these types of requests can be accomplished. Data Backup strategies must be planned and tested to assure all company requirements regarding data retention and recovery are met.

Data types have become more complex as the Internet of Things has expanded the scope of what data is, where it comes from and what it looks like. As we stated earlier in this Blog in the post THE IOT IS RENDERING YOUR OLD DATA BACK AND RECOVERY PLAN OBSOLETE, “Businesses are integrating the IoT with their mission critical applications at an accelerated rate. There is a need for data from specialized devices and applications to be made available to business applications. The data being generated from devices in trucks, shipping docks, and house water meters are being integrated with core business processes for analytics and advanced business processing. So, this data has now become corporate data.”

Data recovery and its interrelationship with business continuity plans must be understood and then reevaluated to meet modern requirements. Consult with professionals that understand theses complex relationships, such as Salvus Data Consultants, of Texas.

01.13.15
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The Internet of Things Creates the Demand for Big Data Solutions

The Internet of Things (IoT) is generating a demand for the management of Big Data. There is a need for data from specialized devices and applications be made available to business applications for increased corporate value.  Businesses are integrating these specialized devices and applications with core business processes for analytics and advanced business processing. This data is a mix of varied data types and has now become corporate data. This complex data creates the demand for new technology.

HadoopHadoop has arrived to answer the challenge. The global market revenue, which was estimated at $2.0 billion in 2013, is rapidly expanding and may grow up to a staggering $50.2 billion by 2020.

While Hadoop is offering answers to the need to handle Big Data, Hadoop requires skills and training. Finding those human resources can be challenging. Another issue is to be able to backup Big Data for the purpose of regulatory requirements or recovery of a catastrophic event.

A Big Data implementation using Hadoop presents a need for even more focus on the ability to recover from a catastrophic event quickly. However, the SMB is not often staffed or tooled to design and execute a backup strategy of this level of complexity.  The other consideration is that since the attractiveness of Hadoop is to use local servers, there is a further need to implement a data backup and recover strategy that can be managed remotely but not have a requirement that the live data be transferred to or running in a cloud environment.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting an DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the SMB to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes. Additionally, the SMB can have a comprehensive Data Backup and Recovery strategy while housing their Big Data locally.

09.22.14
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Black Swan Events are Considerations for Data Back Up Strategies

Data Backup and Recovery is critical to protecting against the Black Swan Effect.

The “Theory of Black Swan Events” is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that the event is a major issue and a surprise. Understanding the cause of the catastrophic event is

Black Swan Event

Black Swan Event

generally only possible through hindsight. While it doesn’t happen everyday, it does happen. And when it does – you better be ready!

A Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes:

  • First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
  • Second, it carries an extreme impact.
  • Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

An example would be Data Corruption existing in a server backup. Yes, there are constant occurrences of data corruption coming in daily from server backups where the data is virtually impossible to restore. Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is an advanced utility that can be set up to remedy these common situations on the fly. However, this is only possible if TSM is configured correctly. Your Data backup and Recovery processes should be developed by professionals that understand the nuances of this complex discipline.

Let professionals take over from here, while you concentrate on your core business. You don’t need a Black Swan in your data center. Fort more information on Black Swan Events, contact Salvus Data Consultants.