With only a few days left until Super Bowl XLVI, which will be held in Indianapolis this year, security officials there unveiled a new emergency coordination center on Wednesday.

“We are very proud of this new facility and hope that it serves as a national model of partnership between local, state and federal authorities,” said Mayor Ballard at the Regional Operations Center’s (ROC) grand opening. “The creation and opening of the ROC is an integral part of our ongoing, proactive plan to ensure the safety of the public.”

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1. Plan your timeline backwards
If you know when your exercise is going to happen, start with the date of the proposed rehearsal, and slot in everything you need to do, working in reverse chronological order. It’s easier to schedule everything this way.

2. Remember your aims at all times
Define the aims of the exercise before you start. Is it to test a particular plan, raise general awareness, encourage engagement, or even to get the boss involved? Many exercises have a number of aims. Define the most important at the outset, so you can keep checking that what you’re doing is going to meet them.

3. Don’t insist there’s a plan to test
Think you need a plan before you can hold an exercise? I disagree. Sometimes a good way to start the process is to hold an exercise, especially if you’re trying to get engagement from a wider audience. This comes back to thinking about your aims – what are you trying to get done?

4. Choose the right creator
If you’re starting from scratch, this can be tricky. Ideally you’re looking for someone who’s very logical but also creative. The logic ensures the aims are met and the plan is considered during the creation phase. The best exercises are built with a creative bent, to help make them interesting and fun for the participants. This is more important than them understanding your business, if they know the right questions to ask.

More of the Continuity Central article from Charley Newnham

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Many data center strategies includes using hardened data centers to achieve 99.995% uptime. Hardened data centers, along with redundant data center power and cooling all play a part on maximing reliability and increasing data center uptime.

Not all hardened data centers are alike. Many believe the best type is a reinforced concrete structure.  Reinforced concrete offers the best protection against tornadoes, the most common natural disaster in Midwest data centers and Midwest colocation. F5 tornado resistant data centers help companies protect against wost case.   Reinforced concrete also offers excellent protection from earthquakes.

Some hardened data centers are constructed as a building within a building, based on the thinking that a natural disaster might destroy the outermost building while the inner building protects the data center.  This approach is often used when an existing building is being refit as a data center facility.  The effectiveness of the protection is completely dependent on the type of building and construction.

Hardened data centers can be used as primary (production) data center facilities or as disaster recovery sites.  Many consider a hardened facility more important for the production environment in order to minimize service interruptions.

How important is a hardened data center?  It is critically important if you are trying to avoid downtime and if your area is prone to disaster.

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Many factors play in to the selection secondary data center and office space locations. A good CIO strategy includes multiple geographies in an evaluation of disaster recovery centers. For some organizations Midwest colocation outside of Chicago might be a better solution.

Standard features that many organizations look for when considering disaster recovery centers include:

Hardened data center facilities – With Midwest colocation, F5 tornado resistant data centers building are important, along with earthquake resistant facilities in some areas.

99.995% uptime or better – This is the uptime level expected from Tier IV data centers. Some IT professionals consider the uptime is a DR center to be less important than in the primary data center. If your organization is doing real-time or near-real time data replication, data center uptime in your disaster recovery center is likely as important as in your primary enterprise data center.

Multiple carriers with no cross-connect fees – Access to multiple telecom carriers ensures diverse and reliable connectivity in the event of a disaster, or on an ongoing basis with real-time replication. Data centers with no monthly cross connect fees significantly reduce ongoing costs.

Data center compliance and certification – Compliance and certifications in the disaster recovery center are just as important as the primary data center.

Data center pricing model – Simple is better. Most organizations seem to prefer to pay for power, cooling and space incrementally as they use it.

Advantages to Midwest data centers located outside of Chicago include:

• Geographic diversity, especially for Chicago-based organizations.
• Overall lower costs, including, lower data center power costs, lower costs of construction labor, and lower data center capital costs.
• A theoretically lower risk from placing the disaster recovery center outside of one of the USA’s five largest cities.

Wholesale colocation providers offer the most flexibility for organizations that prefer to own and control their own telecom connections, network, servers and storage. Some wholesale data centers offer disaster recovery office space. This space can be custom fit by the organization to use for emergency call centers or workspace recovery.

Considering disaster recovery options in Chicago? Consider Midwest colocation providers outside of Chicago in your search.

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Workplace recovery and workgroup recovery are common terms for a particular set of services in the disaster recovery space. These services usually include a subscription to an office space environment to use in the event of a disaster. This office space has multiple workstations, each with a desk, chair, computer, and phone, along with access to printers, Internet connection and bathrooms. Companies pay a monthly fee for each “seat” they need, so a company might buy 50 seats in a 200 seat facility. Workgroup recovery service providers usually oversubscribe the seats 5 to 10 times so they can be profitable.

When the disaster strikes, companies call and declare a disaster. Additional costs accrue based on the length of time a company uses the space. The problem is that in a regional disaster, you may be too late. If enough companies call before you, you may be left without space. The first few companies who call are the ones who get the space. If a company is the second to call and the first company has all 200 seats, then the second company is out of luck.

That is why Lifeline is offering permanent space for workgroup recovery on our Eastgate campus. Companies can rent 2500 or more square feet of office space and build their own workgroup recovery on the same campus and under the same roof as their disaster recovery colocation. This takes the guesswork and the risk out of a disaster scenario.

Is it more expensive or less expensive? It depends. Give us a call at 317.423.2591 if you’d like to do the math.

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• Risks of natural disaster are lower
• Cost of real estate is lower
• Cost of power and labor is low
• Great access to multiple telecom providers in many areas

So if you’ve decided on Midwest colocation, how do you pick the right outsource data center?  Use your company’s specific needs as your criteria for selection.  Here are a few key criteria that are common to many of our clients:

• Hardened data center facilities – tornado, flood and seismic resistant
• Carrier neutral data center – multiple telecom providers with no cross-connect fees
• Affordable colocation – does the pricing model allow you to grow incrementally without penalties?
• Disaster recovery center facilities – is office space available?  Are there spaces to stage and store equipment?
• Large data center – is there enough available space for you to grow if the need arises?

Not all Midwest colocation providers are alike.  Do your homework and you’ll improve the odds of finding the best facility for your company’s needs.

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Murphy’s First Law is generally well known and accepted:

“If it can go wrong, it will go wrong.”

Murphy’s First Law reminds us of the importance of risk assessment and the value of investment in risk prevention.

More of the Continuity Central article from Robin Gaddum

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Benefits

Higher uptime – Outsource colocation (another name for outsource data center) providers offer highly reliable facilities with 99.995% uptime, which translates to 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. Outsource data centers help you solve the power, cooling, fire suppression and security problems separately from Information Technology specific problems.

Lower costs – Outsource data center pricing models that allow you to pay-as-you-grow let you manage costs and forecast growth. Incremental pricing models help IT organizations and cloud service providers to build effective ad meaningful cost models for budgeting and charge back.

Better compliance – Companies leverage outsource data center certifications to avoid the costs of certifying internal data center facilities. Are your clients asking for SAS 70 data centers, Tier IV data centers, HIPAA, FISMA, and PCI compliance? Are you willing to bear the resource and financial burdens of maintaining compliance and related data center certifications?

Risks

Managing off-site data center facilities can be complex, whether the data center is for primary production systems or secondary, backup systems.

Moving data center facilities is a complex process. Some companies cannot stand any sort of outage or downtime for their computer systems. Moving to an outsource data center is a complex project.

Choosing the wrong outsource data center provider can be an expensive proposition. What are the key components? 99.995% uptime, a flexible data center pricing model, no cross-connect fees, SAS 70 data center compliance are good places to start.

Do the benefits of using outsource computer room facilities outweigh the risks your organization? Call the data center strategy experts to learn more.

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Disaster Recovery Planning

To help identify what services would be required (and when), it is recommended that a full contingency plan be developed and tested to ensure business continuity. The following key areas should be completed to ensure that the Business Recovery Plan is effective in all circumstances.

Threat Assessment

Firstly, you will need to decide on the disaster scenarios that you wish to protect against. It should also be remembered that prevention forms a very important part of the pre-planning phase, and any areas needing to be improved should also be highlighted at this stage. The provision of a Disaster Recovery service is usually intended to cover, but not limited to, the following scenarios.

• Loss of power
• Loss of computer equipment
• Loss of communication equipment
• Loss of Computer room
• Total loss of a facility

There are many other disaster scenarios that need to be considered to satisfy that all aspects have been explored. Some of these are non-physical disasters or environmental side effects such as bomb warnings, adverse weather conditions or loss of access to the building caused by a localised incident. It is recommended that you carry out a full Threat Assessment to enable all possible scenarios to be considered.

More of the Ezine Articles post from Paul E Moore

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While this may seem counter-intuitive, there are some nice benefits:

The primary enterprise data center gets all the benefits of wholesale data centers: 99.995% uptime or better, data center power redundancy, multiple data center cooling systems, and carrier neutral access to multiple telecommunications providers. Many companies improve uptime significantly, just by moving into a facility with tier IV data center uptime levels.

The existing data center, which may be running out of power, space or cooling, gets new life as the secondary data center. Continued use of an existing asset can benefit a company in a number of ways.

The disaster recovery data center is no longer dependent upon telecom links to be available to users at the data center location. A failure in the telecommunications circuits would allow a company to switch over to the on-site disaster recovery center with little or no need for telecommunications to the outside world.

Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities? Wholesale colocation facilities can be used for either primary or disaster recovery data centers. Many companies determine that the primary data center benefits more from the high uptime and carrier flexibility that a outsource data center offers. And they can leverage the existing in-house data center as the disaster recovery data center, in the unlikely event that the colocation facility is lost.

In Part 9 of this series, we’ll address how wholesale colocation can help when a company is centralizing the hub of a wide area network.

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