Archive for the ‘Disaster Recovery Colocation’ Category
Desktop exercises are instrumental in getting staff and others involved in business continuity, especially if they’re – dare I say it – interesting and fun for those taking part. To help in making your exercises successful, here are 19 top tips, listed in no particular order:
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
Information Technology is complex. And though solutions like virtualization, storage and networking technologies give businesses a strategic advantage, IT is still difficult and labor intensive to run in-house.
But it’s not the case with wholesale colocation. Colocation providers (in English: high tech landlords) deliver hardened data centers, redundant power, cooling, fire suppression, security, and access to telecom. All the complexities of 99.995% uptime are handled by experts.
You can always build your own data center. If you have mission critical facilities experts on staff, you can probably build a nice one. But can you spend the capital costs on two of everything? How does the cost compare to wholesale data center space?
Getting out of the data center facilities business can simplify your IT.
If you believe simpler is better, talk to Lifeline Data Centers for your enterprise data center and your disaster recovery colocation.
Is your organization considering Chicago disaster recovery data centers? Chicago colocation and disaster recovery providers offer many options. Are these best for your organization?
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.
Midwest Disaster Recovery and permanent workplace recovery space may make sense to companies who don’t want to be left without office space in a disaster.
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.
When I talk to people about what we do in our profession, rather than bore them with the textbook definition of business continuity instead I often refer to Murphy’s Law. I think you can communicate the concept of risk management in business continuity quite simply by describing what I think of as Murphy’s Three Laws of Business Continuity.
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
What is the business impact of outsourcing your data center facilities?
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.
Paul E Moore has written a great elemental article on the key components to a disaster recovery plan. Chicago disaster recovery facilities and other Midwest disaster recovery centers offer great services. Don’t forget your part, the planning, so that when you need your disaster recovery center, you’re ready to use it.
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
A recent study pointed out that fear of downtime outranked data theft among consequences of a data breach or other intrusion. There’s a reason for that ranking, and it extends far beyond breaches.
According to a Trusted Strategies/Solera Networks survey of 200 security professionals, system or network downtime or outage was the top concern when dealing with the aftermath of a security incident.
It’s no great leap to see that the concern applies to any kind of downtime, not just that caused by a breach of security.
The reason that downtime topped the list, according to survey respondents, was the awareness that downtime — and especially the often chaotic process of recovering from it — is something too many businesses are unprepared for.
For the IT professionals participating in the survey, the focus on consequences of a data breach were paramount. That downtime, associated with cleaning out systems, insuring that the systems actually are cleaned, then restoring the systems to full operational capability rightly tops security concerns… and you can be close to positive that it tops business concerns as well.
More of the Information Week article from Keith Ferrell
Enterprises pursuing virtual strategies seem to be placing themselves at greater risk of substantial data loss even as the virtual technology they are deploying simplifies and reduces the cost of disaster recovery (DR).
That’s the contradictory take-away from a new survey from Symantec on the state of backup and recovery capabilities in virtual environments. The survey, conducted by Applied Research, showed that nearly half of enterprise data stored on virtual systems is rarely backed up and fully 60 percent of virtualized servers do not figure into DR plans – a one-third gain over 2009. And this is despite the fact that DR now comprises more than a quarter of annual IT budgets.
As we pointed out a few weeks ago, there certainly is no shortage of disaster recovery systems tailored to virtual environments. In fact, virtualization makes recovery that much easier by increasing the portability of both data and operating systems across various hardware platforms. In an age when entire data centers can be hosted in the cloud, this inability or unwillingness to ensure backup of virtual environments is puzzling. As solutions provider CSS points out in a recent blog, the cloud provides a much more flexible DR framework than a traditional backup facility at a substantially lower price point.
More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole
What you will learn in this tip: Disaster recovery and business continuity professionals often turn to hot sites and cold sites for disaster recovery planning. This tip provides a good starting point for those who are investigating hot/cold site options, and trying to decide which option is best.
What is a hot site? Think of a hot site for disaster recovery as a secure, hardened building that’s equipped to support your current IT production activities right now. The building has equipment (e.g., servers) that’s comparable to your existing infrastructure; it has your principal business applications in place (these were determined by a business impact analysis); and will also have access to your most current data (usually by some form of data backup activity). The hot site will also have conference rooms for your disaster recovery staff to meet, areas to change clothes if needed, food and beverages available, and possibly even a store to buy clothing, and an exercise area.
What is a cold site?
By contrast, a cold site disaster recovery site is a secure facility that is mostly empty space — awaiting the arrival of equipment and personnel in the aftermath of a disaster declaration — and has power, access to communications services, lighting, and possibly preconfigured work areas with furniture, phones, fax machines and copiers. But most often, it is an empty area that is ready for occupancy by customers who have declared a disaster and will be setting up their recovery site in that building.
More of the SearchDisasterRecovery article from Paul Kirvan
