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May 16th, 2012

Whether you arfe a one-man operation or an international corporation, your business relies on a set of core processes used by people in specific roles who require certain IT systems and data. When disaster strikes, these people need to find a way to keep these processes up and running.

But too often, DR strategies focus more on the type of disaster than the particular business processes you need to protect. Focusing on the business instead of merely on the disaster helps to ensure your business can survive many challenges you might never have considered.

This disaster recovery plan template is a road map for how businesses of all sizes can develop an effective business continuity plan designed to minimize the impact of disasters and reduce risk of time, money, valuable data, and reputation.
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Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Strategy Definition

April 29th, 2012
One recent survey finds that onetime events, such as the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, and Europe's sovereign debt crisis, exposed vulnerabilities in private companies' business continuity preparedness. Among the chief executives surveyed only a minority say they are very confident that their current risk management strategies will prove effective over the next few years, with nearly one-third (29 percent) citing the need to revisit those strategies.

The need to revisit business continuity strategy was also cited by a greater percentage of companies that have over seas operations (39 percent), compared with US-only companies (21 percent). International companies are also more alert to the threat and potential effects of low-probability, high-impact events: 81 percent of companies that feel a need to revisit business continuity plans in light of last year's events.

Among companies that are changing their business continuity plans, there seems to be a disconnect between where they think their focus should be and where it actually is. While most of them (87 percent) agree that they need to focus more on planning for a broad range of emerging risks, the bulk of their business continuity effort (70 percent) goes into preparing for known, recurring risks; a considerably smaller 30 percent of their effort goes into planning for as-yet-unknown events.
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A business continuity plan defined

April 28th, 2012
A business continuity plan is a users' guide - the documentation - for how to preserve an organization. In order for a plan to be useful, it must be created before an interruption occurs. Business continuity is disaster recovery. Lost revenue is a driving force in business continuity. The reason to do a recovery plan is essentially to keep the funding coming in and the services going, and the clients being served.

Emergency planning are those procedures and steps done immediately after an interruption to business.
Disaster recovery are the steps taken to restore some functions so that some level of services can be offered.
Business continuity is restoration planning, completing the full circle to get your organization back to where it was before an interruption.

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Business Continuity Planning 101

April 2nd, 2012

The basic process for developing a business continuity plan is:

Create a business continuity planning team: Members should be from operations management, the chief security officer, the IT department, legal staff, and human resources.
Define leadership roles: Determine which executives and employees are critical to operating the business (and supporting customers) that need to have access to key systems and information at all time.
Assume the worst and plan for needed extra capacity: Before an event occurs, businesses need to plan ahead for increased network bandwidth and secured remote access requirements.
Define emergency voice and data communications solutions: There are many to choose from, but a SSL VPN is one of the leading solutions to provide flexible, remote access, which is essential to any business continuity plan.
Define access points for operations, network and IT: Create a business continuity portal for employees and partners. If the company has an Intranet, this site becomes command central from which employees can access information - HR policies, emergency contacts and a "start here" feature should be included.
Contract for a secondary back-up site: Should the primary site be unavailable, companies should have a real-time mirror of data and staff housed at a secure facility.
Backup data: In the event that the secondary site is unavailable, organizations should plan for multiple layers of failover.
Plan to utilize smartphones and tablets: With mobile devices and "wireless networks", IT departments can leverage these tools to ensure complete connectivity in times of emergencies.
Pre-arrange Internet meeting capabilities: In the event of an office closure, employees still need to communicate internally or with external parties (i.e. suppliers, customers). Implement the technology before it is needed
Review number of sites and VPN gateways: Conducting an annual audit to provide a complete picture of your network and the ability to address problem areas before a disaster strikes.
Test and test again: These 'fire drills' enable the business continuity team to see how the current system is working, especially when employees are accessing information from remote locations (i.e. from home, a relative's house, and hotel). Once complete, those in management, IT and human resources can modify their business continuity plan accordingly.
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Many large companies believe they are immune to disasters

March 1st, 2012
Disaster Strikes Amazon - Europe down for two days

A lightning strike knocked out servers at Amazon's only European data center and the provider has warned some of those affected face delays of up to two days before they get back online.

Amazon has told its EC2 customers in Europe some of them could face outages of as long as 24 to 48 hours as the cloud provider struggles to recover from a lightning strike that disrupted power supplies to its Dublin, Ireland data center. It took 3 hours to recover the first of the affected instances last evening European time (midday Pacific Time) and after almost 12 hours a quarter still remained offline, with knock-on effects slowing their likely recovery time.
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