Tag Archives: Disaster recovery

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.

06.04.15
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The IoT is Rendering Your Old Data Back and Recovery Plan Obsolete

The Internet of Things is creating more complex data types within the corporate business data environment. This is making the stalworth Disaster Backup and Recovery plan that corporate management is relying on to protect their company obsolete.

IoTBusinesses 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.

So, what is the Internet of Things? First, let’s understand that there is a growing trend in the use of sensors in cars, traffic lights, water meters, and much more. When these devices connect to the Internet to transfer their data to monitoring applications, business applications, or to other devices, this environment becomes the Internet of Things. It is important to understand that it is the data being transferred over the Internet that makes the Internet of Things (IoT). If these devices or applications remained in communication with only their own platform, they would not be part of IoT.

Irregardless of data changes from the increased impact of the IoT, Sungard states in their post Are Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Procedures More Than A Year Old? Throw Them Out!. “In other words,  people kept using their old disaster recovery blueprints, backup and recovery procedures, run books, and disaster recovery binders. Some of these items are brought out only once a year and, even then, only a cursory glance is paid to them.”

Adding the issue of more complex data types, there should be no hesitation to prioritize the review and update of the corporate data disaster recovery plan. Central backup procedures must be reviewed for proper governance and assurance of data resiliency. This data is now mission critical and must be treated as legacy business data, just like Accounting, Payroll, etc. This provides an additional burden on the IT staff in understanding the implications of developing backup procedures for these diverse data types.

A business needs to ensure data integrity across the enterprise. A data backup and recovery Managed Service Provider (MSP) is an excellent solution to the new challenges of diverse data types. An MSP can remotely execute business critical backup strategies. Salvus Data, a data backup and recovery MSP, centrally monitors and manages your backup environments cost-effectively. Salvus does this while the corporate data remains within the cpntrol of the company. This improves backup success rates and data recovery. Contact a Tivoli Storage Manager AAA certified MSP; Salvus Data Consultants

05.18.15
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The Third Platform Will Impact Data Backup and Recovery Procedures

The Third Platform is having an impact on Information Technology department processes and procedures at an accelerated rate. This is while there is still not a clear distinction of the elements of the Third Platform. The Open Group is identifying a set of new platform capabilities, and architecting and standardizing an IT platform by which enterprises can reap the business benefits of Open Platform 3.0. While the elements of the Third Platform are still being clarified, there is little doubt that the platform is here now.Third Platform

The trends of the Third Platform are generally known to be;

  • Mobility
  • Social networks and social enterprise
  • Big data analytics
  • Cloud computing
  • The Internet of Things

The post The Emergence of the Third Platform states “The emergence of the third generation of enterprise platforms is manifested at the crossroads of four distinct, almost simultaneous, disruptive technology shifts; cloud computing, mobile computing, big data-based analytics and the IoT. The use of applications based on these technologies, such as social media and business-driven insight systems, have contributed to both the convergence and rate of adoption.”

SAP may be further blurring the lines of these trends as they role out SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. Where Big Data was considered to be the platform for Analytics, SAP is implementing HANA for Big Data mission-critical transactional applications as well as analytics delivered from the Cloud. In concert with technology trends and market needs, IBM Continues T0 Expand Its Cloud Offering. IBM announced that it is bringing a greater level of control, security and flexibility to cloud-based application development and delivery with a single-tenant version of Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service.

Data Backup and Recovery is just one of the IT processes that will need to be reviewed as the Third Platform further develops. Advanced considerations must be incorporated in strategic plans and day-to-day procedures. However, if an organization is not staffed or tooled to design and execute a backup strategy of this level of complexity, 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. A company should look to a service provider that specializes in complex backup strategies while leaving the IT staff time to manage their daily and long-term strategic activities.