Disaster Plan Key to Success for CIOs and IT Managers

ISO 27000, SOX, PCI-DSS & HIPAA Compliant

The Disaster Plan is the standard that meets all compliance objectives.

Janco's DRP Template can be used for any size of enterprise. The Disaster Recovery template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant. The template comes as both a Word document and a static fully indexed PDF document and includes:

• DRP and BCP Template
• Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
• Work Plan
• DR / BC Audit Program
• Pandemic Planning Checklist

 

More on Disaster Plans

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Core disaster recovery planning questions

May 17th, 2012

Whether your business is a one-man operation or it employs a thousand people, the starting point is the same: identify the processes critical to your success. To do this, you should first define what critical means in your business. Rank each process according to that definition, and then ask how long can your business survive without it, who performs it, and what IT resources support it.

 

Questions you can ask:

• Can you simply not survive without this process? This should be your primary priority. Your business continuity plan must protect all primary priorities when a disaster strikes.
• Can you survive only a day or two without it? This should be a secondary priority. Your business continuity plan should address all secondary priorities after primary priorities are handled.
• Can you survive a week or more without it? Add it to your list of low priorities.

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Create Your Data Protection Strategy

April 29th, 2012

Create Your Data Protection Strategy key considerations:

 Backup/Recovery and Staging Tradeoff - Tailoring your data protection solution to the right mix of staging and backup/recovery approaches is accomplished by defining the RTO and RPO for your various types of data based on the tradeoff between your business needs and cost.

Case for Archiving Your Static Data

• First, archives provide long-term protection of data for compliance purposes.
• Second, they make historical data available for repurposing in new applications.
• Third, archiving can provide performance benefits for your company. These performance benefits are realized in the following ways: Once static data is moved to an archive, it is no longer mixed in with your dynamic data, and therefore does not need to be backed up repeatedly. For most organizations, this means the time and storage required to complete a full backup can be reduced significantly. Plus, separating static data from your dynamic data can also significantly reduce the amount of time required to search for files.

 

Backup to Disk - Using disk-based data protection techniques to protect your dynamic data and make disaster recovery copies will allow you to gain the most from your investment in data protection. Disk-based data protection enables faster recovery times and helps to dramatically reduce your administrative time and costs.

Real-Time Data Protection technologies provide your business with the maximum RTO and RPO benefits. Best-of-breed real-time data protection solutions will allow you to recover your data back to any point in time, down to the second, and some even work to provide a high-availability solution

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Setting up a remote disaster recovery site

April 14th, 2012

During the  disaster recovery planning process a CIO needs to establish a remote disaster recovery site, but are faced a challenge all too familiar to many enterprises: How to replicate large amounts of data across the country and still meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)?

For example if the goal of full data recovery within 3 hours, with an RPO of 24 hours. CIOsoften are not coming close to meeting those objectives as replication process mat not able to complete across the WAN. A company simply may not be able to move that much data over long distances in a reasonable amount of time without very expensive and time consuming manual intervention.

 

More specifically, given the limited physical space in their data centers and the high volume of traffic that needed to be moved between data centers, the company may require a very high capacity virtual WAN optimization solution.

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Cloud as a Backup Solution for a Disaster Plan

April 2nd, 2012

A cloud based backup approach for a disaster recovery plan lets you determine the ideal mixture of capital and operational expenditures. For budgeting purposes, recovery capabilities can be tiered to reflect the unique value and restoration requirements of different types of data, and storage processes can easily be tuned to comply with updated business procedures.

It is the selective use of the cloud lets you choose any combination of the following, a mix you can freely adjust as your needs evolve.

Cloud or Software as a Service (SaaS) - Your data is protected in a secure data center and hardware and software is managed for you, including all necessary support and professional services. Protecting your data in the cloud also gives you the inherent benefit of offsite disaster recovery. If your goal is to make life as simple as possible for your IT team but still make sure your data is safe and easily accessible.

On-Premise - You manage all the hardware and software you need under your roof. Pre-configured, all-in-one appliances are available to simplify deployment and maintenance and speed backup and recovery cycles. You can choose to maintain your infrastructure with your own team, outsource this responsibility to a certified local provider, or take advantage of both internal and external resources.

Hybrid - With the increasingly popular cloud-connected model, certain categories of information can be stored in the cloud, while those that need to be instantly available can reside onsite - or a primary backup can reside in one (onsite or in the cloud) with replication to the other. This method offers the greatest flexibility to choose the right blend of capital and operational expenditures.

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Most organizations have business continuity plans in place

March 16th, 2012

Most enterprises have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place, however in a review of 128 companies that have recently has to activate their disaster plans Janco has found that 64% do not have and or have not followed the protocols to ensure the safety of their employees and critical security needs of their information assets. 

2011 had a wide range of events that impacted the operations in many organizations around the globe. While weather was the most common cause of organizational disruption, other significant events included strikes (which caused problems for 55 percent of managers), the Blackberry outage (39 percent), the civil disturbances (26 percent), natural disasters such as the Japan earthquake and tsunami (19 percent), and international social and political unrest such as the Arab Spring uprising (18 percent).

This wide range of threats has prompted business continuity management to become increasingly. After a sharp increase in business continuity management uptake over the past two years 61 percent of managers now work for an organization that has Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans in place.

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