Newsfeed for Disaster Recovery
It is now generally recognized that Business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning are vital activities. However, the creation of (and maintenance of) a sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan, is a complex undertaking, involving a series of steps.
Prior to creation of the plan itself, it is essential to consider the potential impacts of disaster and to understand the underlying risks: these are the foundations upon which a sound business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan should be built. Following these activities the plan itself must be constructed - no small task. This itself must then be maintained, tested and audited to ensure that it remains appropriate to the needs of the organization. And what about the support infrastructure and services?
The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template is designed to consider all these issues and to catalog some of the most highly acclaimed products and services. Here you will find tools to assist with BIA and risk analysis, as well as other items to help you create, maintain and audit the plan itself. Whether you are entirely new to business continuity and disaster recovery planning, or whether you already have a proven and established plan, the template should hopefully prove to be of real value.
You can get the full news feed by going to
http://www.disaster-recovery-planning.com/News/disaster-recovery-planning-com.xml.
Below are the latest the items from that feed.
Disaster Recovery Business Continuity for Remote Offices
08/25/2010
Data residing outside the data center at remote and branch offices (ROBOs) accounts for a significant portion of an enterprise's information store, yet it often either is protected with inefficient backup processes or is not protected at all -- leaving companies at risk on many fronts.
In a recent research report, high priority projects for ROBOs included improving information security measures; ensuring compliance with government, industry or corporate governance mandates; and improving Disaster Recovery Business Continuity processes.
- more info
DRP and Security Plans key to compliance
08/18/2010
Preparing for a disaster requires detailed planning, preparation and testing. Knowing what IT assets need to be recovered, where to recover them and how to recover them are the essence of IT Disaster Recovery. The most difficult challenge is mapping the prioritized business requirements to the IT assets so that recovery can be staged. The recovery strategy then evolves based on the available options which support the required recovery objectives. The resulting Disaster Recovery plans contain all of the information detailing where to go, who is to do what and the information required to rebuild servers, restore applications and data as well as restart and synchronization procedures. - more info
DRP Template
08/11/2010
If you are new to recovery planning, make sure that you research the subject thoroughly before embarking on a disaster recovery project. Consider engaging a consultant (internal or external to your organization) to help you in your project planning effort. Disaster recovery planning is not a two-month project, neither is it a project that once completed, you can forget about. An effective recovery plan is a live recovery plan. The plan must be maintained current and tested/exercised regularly.
The primary objective of a Business Resumption Plan is to enable an organization to survive a disaster and to reestablish normal business operations. In order to survive, the organization must assure that critical operations can resume normal processing within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, the goals of the Business Resumption Plan should be to:
- more info
- Identify weaknesses and implement a disaster prevention program;
- minimize the duration of a serious disruption to business operations;
- facilitate effective co-ordination of recovery tasks; and
- reduce the complexity of the recovery effort.
Why is diaster and business continuity planning important
08/07/2010
Federal, State and Local Governments are chartered to mitigate and control the event, provide life and safety measures, and then restore infrastructures. The Red Cross provides emergency relief in the form of food, health and shelter. If insured, an insurance company will settle damage claims and provide monetary relief. However, none of these organizations will, or can, recover your business. Your companys recovery is strictly up to you, and it commences with a solid business continuity/disaster recovery plan.
Should your company experience a disaster, the first 72 hours following the incident will be the most critical in your recovery efforts. How you respond during that period will determine if your business will survive or not. Furthermore, the most important hour is the one immediately following the event. If ever required, your Business continuity plan will enable you to respond in a systematic and organized fashion. It will guide your organization, step-by-step, from responding to the actual event all the way through to full occupancy of your repaired facility.
- more info
Simple Disaster Planning Activities
07/24/2010
Creating a disaster recovery plan is a complex task; however there are a number of basic steps that you can follow to start thre process
- more info
- Prepare your systems, processes, and people for an organized response to disaster when it strikes.
- Identify critical IT systems and develop a long-range strategy.
- Select and train your disaster recovery team.
- Conduct a Business Impact Analysis.
- Determine risks to your business from natural or human-made causes.
- Get management support.
- Create appropriate plan documents.
- Test your plan.
Disaster Plan & Business Continuity Infrastructure
07/13/2010
The key technology elements of a Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan (DRP/BCP) infrastructure are the primary data center, a remote site that duplicates the resources in that primary location and the method used to get files (master and transaction) between the two sites - such as high-bandwidth network connections. The best DRP/BCP strategies follow a "redundant every-thing" philosophy throughout the data center. Multiple mainframes and servers should run in the production and backup data facilities. Then, if a component in the production system encounters problems, it immediately fails over to the local backup as a first line of defense.
Power supplies and communication links are one of the most critical components in a DRP/BCP strategy.
- more info
White House email system down for a day
06/23/2010
High tech White House falls down when its email disaster plan does not work.
The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced at a 1:45 p.m. press briefing that he was unable to send out the customary week-ahead memo as the White House e-mail system was "not working so well." D.C. reporters got their next e-mail from the White House around 8:30 the following morning indicating that the outage lasted most of a day.
- more info
How to calculate the cost of downtime
06/18/2010
One overlooked truth is that downtime costs accelerate in a non-linear fashion every hour. If a system fails for five minutes, the costs are fairly low because manual methods (paper and pencil) of making records or communicating by telephone instead of e-mails can suffice to conduct business. Over an extended period, however, the volume of work overwhelms the manual processes. Yet some businesses - such as Amazon or e-Bay - cannot run at all on manual processes. Business and financial operations increasingly deteriorate, and the rate of dollar losses grows - sometimes to the point of fatally damaging the business.
In addition, when assessing the financial impact of downtime, you need to consider factors such as potential lost revenue, reductions in worker productivity, and damaged market reputation. In some cases, downtime can even reduce shareholder confidence, which can create unnecessary and unplanned costs. Financial analysts and accountants at your company can help you come up with the factors at your company that are affected by downtime and contribute to its costs.
- more info
Disaster Planning Considerations
06/10/2010
Many enterprises have taken a segmented approach to Business Continuity and Availability, adding point technology and reactive services to address disaster recovery. This approach can be very complex, time-consuming and costly. The task becomes much easier when a single vendor takes responsibility for architecting, implementing, testing and supporting the solution.
1 In the past, this type of business demand was only consigned to a relatively small group. However, many more organizations of all sizes, in all industries and located across the globe, now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster. To make it more interesting, the number and types of applications that require this level of protection is very diverse. - more info
There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, ESG research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications. Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime.
Many Businesses Fail After a Disaster
05/27/2010
Businesses' reliance on IT systems and digital data has never been greater. The 2007 Best's Underwriting Guide found that only 6% of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive while 43% never reopen and 51% close within 2 years of the disaster. Best's Underwriting Guide 2007 also found that 93% of the companies that did not have their data backed up in the event of a disaster went out of business. An analysis of SMBs' prioritization of disaster recovery, backup and high availability for 2008 shows that businesses understand the risks to their business and the value of protection. However, many organizations still think that backup is a sufficient disaster recovery plan. However, mid-sized enterprises are at the most risk to disaster and are more likely to rely strictly on backup as a disaster recovery plan.
The needs and resources of mid-market firms are unique. Midsized companies must work with limited finances infrastructure and human resources. Robust disaster recovery used to be affordable and manageable only by large enterprises. Mid-sized enterprises relied more on backup than on a formal disaster recovery plan. As businesses' reliance on IT has grown, backup has increasingly shown its weaknesses. However, the introduction and maturation of several key technologies, such as virtualization, have brought affordable and easily implementable Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity to small and mid-sized companies. SMBs do not always equate virtualization with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity because awareness of the many virtualization applications is just starting to grow.
- more info
Number of Mission Critical Applications Increases
05/11/2010
More processes are "mission-critical" as up to 60% of all applications in US-based medium-to-large enterprises are considered business-critical today (including email, collaboration, and intranet applications and data). This evolution demands that more systems, in more locations, that rely on more timely and sensitive data, be covered by Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning, and requires that datacenter operations teams provide tier-1 application support and data protection for a growing percentage of applications. - more info
Threats drive need for disaster and business continuity plans
04/27/2010
With the ever changing economic climate and security threats, downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From CIOs to the Executive Suite, managers have seen the importance of business uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and profitability. The Disaster Planning Template provides a road map to the most effective strategies and technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.
Planning for recovery - designing and implementing a solution to reduce the amount of recovery time needed after an interruption -is a pressing requirement for businesses of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan that ensures that both data and applications can be recovered quickly, IT managers are generally confronted with several challenges:
- more info
- How can we ensure our applications and data are recoverable without impacting business operations?
- Do we have data protection strategies available to us that meet my recovery point and recovery time objectives?
- Can we afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both local and remote (disaster) recovery requirements?
- Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet our requirements?
Disaster Recovery Planning International Standard Set by Janco
04/22/2010
Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template Now Accepted as the International Standard
Update to the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template has just been released by Janco Associates..
Park City, UT - The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Planning template has been sold to enterprise in over 65 countries around the globe. With the release the latest verison of the template it is in complete compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver 3), ISO 17799, and PCI DSS.
M V Janulaitis the CEO of Janco said, "Our DRP /BCP Template has been accepted by enterprise around the globe as the standard for disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan creation." In response to that need Janco has updated its "Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template" by increasing the content of the template as well as updating the entire document to be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver. 3), ISO 17799, and PCI DSS.The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in over 65 countries around the globe including:
- Angola
- Australia
- Austria
- Bahamas
- Barbados
- Belgium
- Belize
- Bermuda
- Brazil
- Bulgaria
- Canada
- Cayman Islands
- Columbia
- Croatia
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Egypt
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Honduras
- Hungary
- Iceland
- India
- Indonesia
- Israel
- Italy
- Jamaica
- Japan
- Jordan
- Kenya
- Lebanon
- Lithuania
- Macao
- Malta
- Mexico
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Nigeria
- Norway
- Panama
- Philippines
- Poland
- Portugal
- Puerto Rico
- Qatar
- Republic of Ireland
- Romania
- Russia
- Saudi Arabia
- Singapore
- South Africa
- South Korea
- Spain
- Sri Lanka
- Swaziland
- Switzerland
- Taiwan
- Thailand
- Trinidad & Tobago
- Uganda
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Venezuela
- Zambia
The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in government, public, and private enterprises in almost all industries including:
- more info
- Federal Government
- State Governments
- Local Governments
- Law Firms
- Think Tanks
- Chemical
- Telecommunication
- Real Estate
- Manufacturing
- Universities
- School Districts
- Consulting Firms
- Banks
- Financial Service
- Investment Banks
- Credit Unions
- Outsourcers
- Property Mgt
- Heavy Industry
- Light Industry
- Distribution
- Retail
- Hospitality
- Energy
- Insurance
- Medical
- ISPs
- Application Development
- Construction
- Graphics
- Entertainment
- Paper Products
- Defense
- Aerospace
- Media
Outsouring Can Help in Disaster Recovery Planning
04/16/2010
Between hackers, natural disasters, or even a pipe breaking in the office above yours, every business needs a contingency plan. It could mean the difference between riding out a problem and going out of business. For this reason, most businesses are concerned about the safety of their backups. Data loss is a significant concern for any business - and in healthcare and other industries can have huge financial consequences. Solutions typically require that you spend more money on a third party backup solution. Outsourcing is one solution that should not be overlooked. Solutions typically require that you spend more money on a third party backup solution. Outsourcing is one solution that should not be overlooked. - more info
Guidelines for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
04/07/2010
Disaster recovery and business continuity are important business issues that require awareness and planning. Guidelines that can be used in this process are:
- more info
