In the past we were quite satisfied with just backing up data and recovering files as needed. Computer outages were expected and not treated with a large amount of concern. It is amazing how quickly times have changed. As business automation has been enabled for more and more tasks our businesses have become more dependent upon our IT systems. A new process and phraseology has replaced backup/recovery – Business Continuity.
Business continuity deals with more than recovering data but how would your business continue to operate normally or as near normally as possible in the face of a crisis. When it comes to your business IT systems disasters can come in many forms. We think of hurricanes in Florida or tornadoes in the Midwest, or disabling ice storms in the Northeast. Business system interruptions can come in the form of system failures, employee espionage or mistakes, and hacker activity.
To make matters worse these scenarios change all of the time. Six months ago I would have ranked our most common issues that have stopped business as employee mistakes followed by hacker activity then weather events. Reviewing our trouble tickets the past six months hacker activity would now be at the top of that list. Malware such as CryptoWall 2.0 have been devastating to some of your business neighbors. When we perform a root cause analysis of an interruption we typically find a small mistake or error somewhere that grew into a large problem.
To get back to backup/recovery systems. There are still a lot of technologies in place that copy files to tape or external hard drives. The backup might backup system files to ostensibly recover operating system files. Some have taken this technology to the cloud to hedge bets against loss of or access to a facility.
Let’s consider a common failure such as hard drive failure on a database server that is backed up to the cloud. The average cloud backup of a server takes 14 days. This means that if you need to recover your files from the cloud it will likely take 14 days to recover your files from the cloud. Now most services will overnight you a hard drive that contains your data. It typically takes two days to receive the drive once your cloud provider processes the data drive and ships it to you. Mean time an IT person will need to provision a new server. Without getting into too many details you will likely face in excess of 70 hours of downtime.
Business continuity is a much different picture. Let’s imagine that same failure database server failure. Your business continuity provider is alerted of a potential outage of your server. They remote into your business continuity appliance and begin building a virtual replica of your server. They are confident that your backup data is consistent and current because they constantly monitor the appliance. The replica server is up and running and serving data in just 15 minutes. Your employees take a quick coffee break and are back to work in minutes.
A business continuity appliance is not a silver bullet. Your business needs policies and procedures to deal with the unexpected. Not every eventuality can be averted, but the impact can be lessened through experience and diligence.
This quarter as part of our Lotus Learning Series we will deeply examine the options, costs, and advantages of a sound business continuity plan in a one-hour webinar. If you would like to be added to the invitation list please send me an email at curtispartridge@lotusmserv.com.