Every business owner understands the importance of planning and the proper implementation of said plans. However, after everything is set up, it's easy to overlook the testing of one's plans, which can really come back to hurt you when all of your careful planning falls apart. Nowhere is this more true than with data recovery.
Data backup and recovery is a major part of your business continuity plan. When your business is faced with a disastrous event causing downtime due to data loss, the recovery of your lost data is crucial to getting your business up and running again--and the faster the better. In a dreaded scenario such as this, your next step is to put your data recovery solution into place and hope for the best. How confident are you that when you restore your backup, everything will work as it should? This is where testing comes into the picture.
Going through the effort of testing will prepare your business for unforeseen problems with your backup solution. In an interview with Processor magazine, Adrian Sanabria, senior security analyst of 451 Research, gave an example of a common data recovery scenario gone wrong due to the lack of testing. "It's no good to switch over to disaster recovery (DR) and find that your Tier 0 application won't run because the DR environment is three releases behind. If DR will be expected to support a full production load, plan it as such."
Testing should be done regularly. Many IT professionals agree that a complete test of your backup systems should be done at least once per quarter, and there's no harm in testing more frequently, like monthly or even weekly.
Logistically, testing your company's backup systems may sound like a burdensome task, especially if you're a larger company with multiple departments and multiple locations. Like any project, one way that you can make backup testing easier is to spread it out. For example, a larger corporation may test out a few locations at a time instead of testing every system at once.
Another way that you can test your backup solution is to periodically run your entire business off of it. This the surest way to know that your business can withstand a disaster. Sanabria tells Processor of a major retail company that tested their data backup systems this way:
They'd actually switch production over to DR once every three months and run the DR environment as production for a full week before switching back. The first few tests were difficult, but the outcome was worth the dedication, because they never worry about whether their DR environment will work.
Any way you slice it, testing a company's backup solution is a time-consuming task that only gets done if the organization understands the value of their data as part of their business continuity plan. If regular testing of your company's backup seems like too burdensome of a task, you can outsource it to QWERTY Concepts. We offer businesses of all sizes our comprehensive Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution. Our BDR solution is much faster compared to the more traditional tape backup systems that some businesses still use. A tape backup could take as much as 40 hour to thoroughly test the integrity of the backed up data, while a BDR may only take an hour to restore.
BDR is the most secure way to backup and recover your company's data. Included with our BDR solution is having us monitor and oversee the entire data backup and recovery process so that you don't have to, which includes regular testing. This will give you peace of mind that if a disaster strikes your business, your data will be just fine and operations will be up and running again as soon as possible. Call us at (877) 793-7891 to learn more about backing up with the QWERTY BDR.
With proper preparation, cloud-based disaster recovery will enable your organization to weather the season of storms and power outages.
The season of power outages has arrived. We can expect coastal tropical storms and hurricanes and Midwest twisters and tornadoes to bring us a season of outages and, unfortunately, lots of loss. Government agencies, if not properly prepared, will see applications and data centers swept away with the same speed and suddenness of the wild weather winds -- even with so much advanced technology and outstanding preemptive tools and systems available.
It was only two years ago when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, knocking out data centers from Virginia to New York to New Jersey. They lost public power and went dark for days, causing vulnerability and leaving lots of important information unavailable.
For government agencies that use their own internal data centers to house applications, public multi-tenant clouds offer a lower-cost, easy-to-deploy disaster recovery/continuation of operations (DR/COOP) solution. The steps below can help data centers plan and execute effectively with minimal to no disruption in the production environment.
1. Know your mission-critical applications. Determine which of your Web-based applications cannot go down for even a short (or extended) period of time. Identify these applications along with their dependencies and minimal hardware requirements to operate. Document your findings as these will become part of your DR/COOP plan and will help you when you move on to step two.
2. Choose a compliant cloud service provider or give a checklist to the one you have. Identify the right cloud service provider (CSP) that can support your business and technical requirements. If possible, choose a CSP that uses the same hypervisor that you use in-house. This will make mirroring a lot easier, faster, and cheaper in the long run.
3. Configure remote mirrored virtual machines. Depending on the hypervisor you currently are using for virtualization, either set up the data center to automatically mirror these virtual machines (VMs), or arrange to manually set up the remote VMs. Either way, make sure there is a mirrored VM for each production system that needs emergency backup.
4. Set up the failover to be more than just DNS. With the mirrored VMs tested and in place, it's time to select a technology that will handle the failover if and when a disaster occurs. When selecting this technology, avoid one that depends on a change to Internet domain name system records. While a DNS change will work, in most cases there will be a downtime of many hours or possibly even more than a day before users can reach the DR/COOP site. Therefore, seek a technology that can detect a failure in your primary data center and redirect end users instantly to the DR/COOP solution.
5. Perform regular failover tests. With the above steps complete, the final step is performing the end-to-end failover test, which must be routinely tested with the DR/COOP site. Depending on internal policies, this test may be as small as one application's individual failover, or you may wish to schedule a full site failover. Whichever is done, it is important to document the process, the steps taken when performing the test, and a clear record of results after each test is done. If your failover plan did not work, refer back to your documentation, identify what did not work as expected, make the adjustments to your plan (and documentation), and test again. You may need to do this multiple times until you have a bulletproof failover plan.
While we can't control Mother Nature, we can control our preemptive strikes against data disasters. A single emergency can take down a data center, but it only takes a simple plan and proper preparation to prevent disaster. Whether you bring the expertise in-house or outsource it, make the time and budget available to properly plan so you are not out of luck during the outages.
Most IT teams have their conventional databases covered in terms of security and business continuity. But as we enter the era of big data, Hadoop, and NoSQL, protection schemes need to evolve. In fact, big data could drive the next big security strategy shift. Get the 6 Tools To Protect Big Data report today (registration required).
Before creating a good business continuity plan, let’s outline the business continuity types, which must be considered when compiling a business continuity plan. The one thing you should really know, which your IT service provider may not clearly define, is that most backup & disaster recovery solutions are simply that – backup & disaster recovery. Though most backup and disaster recovery solutions have their flaws, we will not be discussing that in this article.
It is probably safe to assume that you have a backup and disaster recovery solution in place. That is a great start, but have you thought about the business continuity plan of the equation? Let’s say for instance you have one server which provides your users with access to files and application(s) on the network. If this server is down due to a hardware failure, and your backup and disaster recovery solution comes through for you, your users on the network will continue to work and access to these files and applications as before the failure. This confirms that your core disaster recovery plan is in place. It should always be tested on a regular basis by your IT provider to ensure its reliability over time.
Now, let’s talk about the other possibilities of failures where you will see how a business continuity plan is really different than disaster recovery. As with most companies, you probably have one or more users that really play a key role in your company. What would happen in the case their computer hardware failed? It is unlikely that you have a spare PC, but even if you do, it takes time to configure it for the user, migrate (or restore) their data, install the required applications, and get it ready for the user to get back to work as before. During this downtime, the business is suffering and many business functions may be delayed, not to mention the financial and physical burden on the business. Your backup and disaster recovery solution is unlikely to help you in this case, because the user is not a server, but the business role may be just as important.
Another scenario would be if your company’s location suffers from physical damage by flood, fire, or any other natural or artificial disaster. Again, for the sake of this example, we will assume your backup and disaster recovery is also replicating to the cloud where you can recover your server(s) and expose them to the web. Once these servers have been restored, how will your users access the data on these servers? We have to assume that the location is inaccessible and whether the users are at home, a hotel, or in a temporary location - configuring their computers to get them to a working order will be a challenge and may amount to days or weeks of downtime. We are still only discussing the data part of the business continuity plan, but wow will your users communicate with your customers, vendors, and each other? What will be the physical and financial burden of the business in these cases? These are the questions you need to be asking yourself. Though this is not a situation of data loss, being down for days or weeks can be catastrophic to the survivability of your business.
Your business data is nothing to mess with - that is why a bullet-proof business continuity plan is necessary. At QWERTY Concepts, we understand the importance of up-time, and the burden downtime has on the business. With this in mind, our internal R&D department has spent years developing, testing, and improving our backup & disaster recovery solutions, cloud disaster recovery solutions, business continuity plans, and cloud computing solutions. With 75% of all businesses in the US being small businesses – QWERTY Concepts focuses on building enterprise-level technology solutions to cater to the majority of America’s businesses.
