2012年6月8日星期五

Time to Check Your Disaster Recovery Plans

DR plans revolve around two metrics, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO):

Hurricane season began last month, which serves as a good reminder to test your disaster recovery (DR) plans. Traditional IT practice calls for testing DR plans annually. However, things change during the year coachoutletonlineusa.weebly.com, things that easily trip up a DR effort.

If you needed another reminder, Symantec just released its 2009 disaster recovery survey coachoutletonlineusa.weebly.com, its fifth such report. Some of the results may surprise you. For example, the cost per incident averaged $287 oakley sunglasses for sale,000, and 93 percent of the 1,650 organizations surveyed worldwide actually had to execute on their DR plans. Of those, 25 percent failed, a pretty sobering number.

The advent of new technologies, particularly cloud computing and virtualization, which both helps and complicates DR, enables more DR options, lower costs, and greater flexibility. To understand how virtualization complicates backup, check out my article here.

1. People don’t execute the plan correctly.

2. The DR plan was poorly designed.

3. The organization failed to regularly update the DR plan as people, processes, systems, and objectives changed.



DR is a fact of life for all but suicidal businesses. Organizations subject to various regulatory mandates usually have no choice.

So, why do DR plans fail? Experts give three reasons:







In Symantec’s latest study, the median RTO to bring back normal operations was four hours. A typical RPO might be a couple of hours, which means an organization would be willing to risk losing the most recent few hours of data in the event of a problem and hope the data could be recovered or re-created from various logs.

The one ironclad rule of DR: The closer the RPO and RTO get to zero — meaning no loss of data and immediate recovery — the more it costs. Financial services firms and airlines pay whatever it takes to ensure a near-zero RPO and RTO.

1. RPO — defines the amount of data the organization is willing to risk in the event a disaster hits.

2. RTO — defines the length of time the organization will accept to bring back its recovered systems.





In terms of budget, just over half the respondents reported that budgets would remain the same. Looking out two years, the respondents split, with a few percentage points more seeing the DR budget increase while an almost equal amount expected a decrease.

An RPO of hours rather than minutes or seconds can save huge amounts of money. Similarly, an RTO of 12 to 24 hours can lower the cost of DR enormously. Within the organization, different applications can have a different RPO and RTO.

The cloud is more straightforward. Organizations that store their data at a cloud provider or run applications at a SaaS vendor have a built-in measure of DR oakley sunglasses for sale, provided the respective vendors are handling DR well. In that case oakley sunglasses for sale, the organization’s DR plan may focus mainly on ensuring that network links survive the disaster. ###

Related:

没有评论:

发表评论