Disaster Recovery

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Disaster recovery is a key driver of trend to move virtual workloads to the cloud
18
Sep 17

Continuity Central – Disaster recovery is a key driver of trend to move virtual workloads to the cloud

Druva has published the results of its 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey, which looked at how enterprises working in a VMware environment are approaching cloud migration. The survey results show a powerful trend toward moving virtual workloads to the cloud due to its lower cost, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) being the preferred destination for workload migrations. Disaster recovery, workload mobility, and archival automation were all strong adoption drivers, with many organizations looking to save money and maximize IT initiatives focused on simplifying their infrastructure.

Key findings of the Druva 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey:

There is a major shift in the VMware market to migrate data centres to the cloud. 90 percent of companies are aiming to migrate their workloads by 2018, with a clear preference for AWS (47 percent), followed by Microsoft Azure (25 percent).

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Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Crisis preparedness and its impact on shareholder value
07
Sep 17

Continuity Central – Crisis preparedness and its impact on shareholder value

All commercial organizations operating in the digital era exist within a challenging landscape. Underlying trust is weak; expectations of good, transparent governance are high; and acceptance of failure is low.

At the same time, communicating with stakeholders is becoming more complex as traditional addressable audiences fragment into ever-evolving, always-online socially-connected communities, guaranteeing that issues and crises play out very publicly and swiftly.

To navigate these challenges successfully and to protect value for shareholders as companies grow, it’s vital to enhance business resilience. Reducing risk and building trust should be as important as innovating and pursuing operational excellence.

What is a crisis?

The British Standard for Crisis Management (BS 11200:2014) defines a crisis as “An abnormal and unstable situation that threatens the organization’s strategic objectives, reputation or viability.” Understanding this definition is vital in helping an organization to prepare itself to deal with a crisis. Through worst-case scenario planning, organizations can identify what abnormal events they could be exposed to, the impact of abnormal events on the ability to execute strategic objectives, and the damage that could be caused to reputation and viability.

More of the Continuity Central post from Robert McAllister

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – To BIA or not to BIA is not the question…
09
Aug 17

Continuity Central – To BIA or not to BIA is not the question…

Continuity Central recently conducted a survey to seek the views of business continuity professionals on whether it is feasible to omit the business impact analysis (BIA) from the BC process. Mel Gosling, FBCI, explains why he believes this is the wrong question to ask…

The Big Picture

It’s always useful to step back and see the big picture, and with the question of ‘To BIA or not to BIA?’ this bigger picture is that the BIA is an integral part the business continuity management (BCM) process specified in ISO 22301 and promoted by business continuity professional associations such as the BCI in its Good Practice Guidelines. Rather than looking closely at the detailed question, we should look at the bigger picture and ask ourselves whether or not we should use this specific BCM process at all.

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Business continuity / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on SearchDataCenter – Distributed data centers boost resiliency, but IT hurdles remain
27
Jul 17

SearchDataCenter – Distributed data centers boost resiliency, but IT hurdles remain

Distributed data center architectures increase IT resiliency compared to traditional single-site models, with networking, data integrity and other factors all playing critical roles.

Architectures that span distributed data centers can reduce the risk of outages, but enterprises still must take necessary steps to ensure IT resiliency.

Major data center outages continue to affect organizations and users worldwide, most recently and prominently at Verizon, Amazon Web Services, Delta and United Airlines. Whether it’s an airline or cloud provider that suffers a technical breakdown, its bottom line and reputation can suffer.

More of the SearchDataCenter article from Tim Culverhouse

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Organizational risks that you should definitely be acting on
07
Jul 17

Continuity Central – Organizational risks that you should definitely be acting on

It is easy for organizations to feel overwhelmed by the number and scale of the risks that are faced; but often the perception of the potential harm engendered by various risks is exaggerated. In this article Chris Butler lists the real risks that every organization needs to consider.

Did you know the world’s most dangerous animal is not a shark, or a bear, but is in fact a mosquito? What’s certain is that human perception of risk is notoriously flawed; often, the events that concern and outrage us the most are the least likely to happen.

From political and economic tremors to cyber threats, 2017 represents another minefield of risks for businesses. For organizations, forging a deepened understanding of both threats and risk factors is crucial for remaining robust, resilient, and most of all, ahead of the competition. Part of this involves separating the myths from reality. So, what then are the real risks to business today?

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Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Why business continuity managers need to trust ‘gut feel’
15
Jun 17

Continuity Central – Why business continuity managers need to trust ‘gut feel’

Agree or disagree?

Sometimes as a business continuity manager you have a feeling that a certain decision is the wrong one, despite qualitative and quantitative evidence pointing to the contrary. Dominic Irvine explains how research is starting to support the reliability of trusting your gut feeling…

Qualitative and quantitative evidence is sometimes used as a weapon to force decisions through when not everyone involved is convinced; in the face of charts, spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks, gut feel seems like a poor response, and yet what we are learning from research into exertion and fatigue, is that it is one of the most useful tools in our armoury of tests.

After the First World War, much work was done to find a way to measure fatigue but it was deemed such a subjective concept as to be impossible to develop any meaningful way of objectively measuring it. It was not possible to fathom out the complex interaction between emotional, physical and mental aspects of fatigue in a way that could be reliably and accurately counted. And yet, we all know the feeling of being fatigued and how tired we are.

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Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Revamping the business continuity profession: a response
02
Jun 17

Continuity Central – Revamping the business continuity profession: a response

Recently, Continuity Central published ‘Revamping the business continuity profession’; an article in which Charlie Maclean-Bristol looked at challenges faced by business continuity professionals and offered his suggestions for revamping the discipline. Here, David Lindstedt and Mark Armour, developers of the Adaptive Business Continuity methodology, offer their response to the article:

David Lindstedt: Naturally, most folks starting to embrace Adaptive Business Continuity will agree that traditional business continuity methods are not working and it’s time for a change. I totally agree that ‘resilience’ will not be the ‘savior’ of business continuity. As Charlie correctly points out, resilience is an inter-discipline, not a discipline on its own. A business continuity practitioner could run it, but so could anyone from any of the inter-disciplines like ERM, EM, IT DR, etc. The chief concern with resilience will always be: what are the boundaries to what gets included (individual personal psychology to environmental sustainability to the entire content of a MBA program?) and how do you measure its effectiveness?

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CIO Strategy / Data center compliance / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on IT Business Edge – Perception or Reality: Your Security System Is Probably Weaker Than You Think
28
Apr 17

IT Business Edge – Perception or Reality: Your Security System Is Probably Weaker Than You Think

How confident are you about your cybersecurity operations? If you are like the vast majority of respondents in Arctic Wolf Networks’ recent survey, you are highly confident in your cybersecurity defenses.

However, the perception of cybersecurity operations doesn’t match the reality for these mid-market companies. While 95 percent of the respondents think their security posture is well above average and 89 percent think their security systems are combatting attacks, large majorities also admit that they aren’t able to stop certain types of threats and they are so overwhelmed with the breadth of overall IT that security isn’t given the attention it deserves. In a formal statement, Brian NeSmith, CEO of Arctic Wolf Networks, said:

Most mid-market enterprises believe they are safe because they have the traditional perimeter defenses in place. This falls far short of what’s needed for rigorous security in today’s complex threat environment. The challenge smaller enterprises face is that they have all the same security issues as large enterprises with only a fraction of the budget and less specialized personnel.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Sue Marquette Poremba

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off on Continuity Central – IT disaster recovery failures: why aren’t we learning from them?
04
Apr 17

Continuity Central – IT disaster recovery failures: why aren’t we learning from them?

The news of an IT outage impacting a large company seems to appear in the headlines more and more frequently these days and often the root cause seems to be out-of-date approaches and strategies in place for IT disaster recovery and compliance. Common mistakes that businesses make include not testing the recovery process on a recurring basis; and relying on data backups instead of continuous replication. Also, businesses are still putting all their data protection eggs in one basket: it is always better to keep your data safe in multiple locations.

C-level leaders are now realising the need for IT resilience, whether they’re creating a disaster recovery strategy for the first time, or updating an existing one. IT resilience enables businesses to power forwards through any IT disaster, whether it be from human error, natural disasters, or criminal activities such as ransomware attacks. However, many organizations are over-confident in what they believe to be IT resilience; in reality they have not invested enough in disaster recovery planning and preparation. The resulting high-profile IT failures can be used as a lesson for business leaders to ensure their disaster recovery plan is tough, effective, and allows true recovery to take place.

If it ain’t broke… test it anyway

Virtualization and cloud-based advancements have actually made disaster recovery quite simple and more affordable. But it doesn’t stop there: organizations need to commit to testing disaster recovery plans consistently, or else the entire strategy is useless.

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CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / Disaster Recovery / IaaS / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on TheWHIR – 3 Steps to Ensure Cloud Stability in 2017
28
Feb 17

TheWHIR – 3 Steps to Ensure Cloud Stability in 2017

We’re reaching a point of maturity when it comes to cloud computing. Organizations are solidifying their cloud use-cases, understanding how cloud impacts their business, and are building entire IT models around the capabilities of cloud.

Cloud growth will only continue; Gartner recently said that more than $1 trillion in IT spending will, directly or indirectly, be affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years.

“Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. “The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and ‘born in the cloud’ providers.”

More of TheWHIR post from Bill Kleyman

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