Disaster Recovery

Continuity Central – Many organizations mistakenly leaving cloud business continuity to third-party cloud providers

According to new research published by CTERA Networks, while enterprises continue to migrate workloads to the cloud at a rapid pace, protection of cloud-based servers and applications has not fully evolved to meet enterprise requirements for business continuity and data availability.

CTERA’s new eBook, ‘Game of Clouds’, showcases the findings of CTERA’s inaugural cloud backup survey, and presents a deep look at the state of enterprise cloud data protection. A CTERA-commissioned study was conducted by independent research firm Vanson Bourne to examine the data protection strategies of 400 IT decision makers and IT specialists in organizations using the cloud for application deployment at US, German and French organizations. The study analyzes the benefits and pitfalls of current backup strategies, offers key considerations for organizations moving to the cloud, and looks at the impact of poor backup practices on business continuity.

Continuity Central – The State of Enterprise Resilience: survey report

Control Risks has published the results of its latest ‘The State of Enterprise Resilience’ survey, which assesses the degree to which the concept of resilience has gained traction and become embedded within organizations.

Over one third of respondents felt that their organizations lacked the relevant skills or talent to drive corporate resilience; this is an increase of 17 percent on 2015. This is in spite of the fact that 27 percent of respondents have actively recruited dedicated resources to support the resilience agenda and 46 percent have invested in training, awareness, and communications.

Other key findings include:

ISO 22316 provides guidance on resilience programmes
62 percent of respondents were either aware of or have read the draft of ISO 22316 – the guide to organizational resilience. 92 percent of respondents agree with the core principles which focus largely on shared purpose and collaboration across functions. However, 18 percent of respondents indicated that they would not be striving to adopt the core principles, preferring instead to stick to existing processes.

AFCOM – Dissecting the Data Center: What Can – and Can’t – Be Moved to the Cloud

Practical approaches on cloud migration from the AFCOM folks. Re-platforming is a great opportunity for the move, but there are others as well, including staff changes, entering new lines of business, and financial drivers.

According to the results of a recent survey of IT professionals, 43 percent of organizations estimate half or more of their IT infrastructure will be in the cloud in the next three to five years. The race to the cloud is picking up steam, but all too often companies begin implementing hybrid IT environments without first considering which workloads make the most sense for which environments.

The bottom line is your business’s decision to migrate workloads and/or applications to the cloud should not be arbitrary. So how do you decide what goes where?

The best time to consider migrating to the cloud is when it’s time to re-platform an application. You should not need to over-engineer any application or workload to fit the cloud. If it’s not broken, why move it? For the purposes of this piece, let’s assume your organization is in the process of re-platforming a number of applications and you are now deciding whether to take advantage of the cloud for these applications. There are a few primary considerations you should think through to determine if moving to the cloud or remaining on-premises is best.

Evaluating What Belongs on the Ground or in the Cloud

First, ask yourself: Is our application or workload self-contained or does it have multiple dependencies? Something like the company blog would be considered a self-contained workload that can easily be migrated to the cloud. At the other extreme, an in-house CRM, for example, requires connectivity to your ERP system and other co-dependent systems. Moving this workload to the cloud would introduce more risk in terms of latency and things that could go wrong.

More of the AFCOM article from Gerardo Dada

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04
Oct 16

Continuity Central – The IT DR program: a crucial, but not well understood, aspect of disaster recovery

This is the shortest, most complete treatment I’ve ever seen of what it takes to be successful with IT Disaster Recovery. Worth the read.

While the hardware and software costs for disaster recovery are well understood many organizations do not fully realize that, in order to be assured of successfully executing the plan in the event of an outage or disaster, a comprehensive IT DR program must first be in place. An organization can have all the right IT DR hardware and software, but without a properly managed program, its efforts will fail.

Even the organizations that do have this understanding often underestimate the complexities involved in creating an IT DR program and the associated costs.

The DR program consists of the people, processes and tools necessary to implement the IT DR solution and manage its lifecycle. Because this implementation process requires considerable expertise and experience, organizations must carefully consider the costs of developing their in-house skill sets as well as those of purchasing, implementing, and maintaining their own hardware and software in house. They should then compare this expertise and the hardware and software costs to those they could access by going to a third-party managed recovery provider that specializes in providing IT disaster recovery services.

Only by understanding what goes into a full IT DR program and the complete total cost of ownership (TCO) of both an in-house versus a ‘selectively outsourced’ solution can organizations make the right choice.

The DR program consists of five processes: application mapping; developing disaster recovery procedures; test planning and execution; post-test analysis; and recovery lifecycle management. The discussion below will address what each step involves.

CIO Insight – Why Enterprise Still Matters

In today’s economy, executives must account for market pressure while keeping focused on the evolution of innovation in technology. This new reality presents both challenges and opportunities for businesses and IT to align on IT strategy and finding balance between the desire to seek value and manage for risk. Due to the difficulty in finding this balance, business leaders are increasingly contracting with cloud-based service providers for the creation of applications, integrations and custom development, with or without the support of enterprise IT. These leads are essentially acting as CIOs by providing their own technology-led business solutions, which leads to fragmentation and delays in accomplishing business initiatives

More of the CIO Insight article from Mike Sommer

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26
Sep 16

Continuity Central – The unintended consequences of risk reporting

In this article we posit three questions. The first question is: “Is it a social responsibility of companies that they undertake a comprehensive risk assessment?” The second question: “Does the notion of conscience and its application to the generation and use of risk information and information in general, create an obligation for the organization to disclose the results of the comprehensive risk assessment?” The third question: “How do the people in the organization communicate the information from the comprehensive risk assessment to stakeholders and yet preserve security and protect the organization?”

The three questions may, at first, appear simple and straightforward. However, as we dissect each, we find that there is significant complexity intertwined in these questions. While this article does not attempt to provide a rigid framework or hard and fast answers to the above questions, it is our intent to set in motion a dialogue regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its relationship with governance risk and compliance (GRC) activities/obligations that form a social contract between the organization and its stakeholders.

More of the Continuity Central article from Geary W. Sikich and Joop Remmé

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30
Aug 16

Baseline – How IT and the C-Suite Clash on Disaster Recovery

While the vast majority of organizations have a disaster recovery plan, top business executives and IT and disaster recovery managers differ greatly about the prioritization of these plans, according to a recent survey from Bluelock. The accompanying report, “Perspectives on IT Disaster Recovery,” reveals that a great many companies have had a tech-related disruption over the last two years, and these disruptions often impact the ability to deliver products and services. But C-level execs and vice presidents are more likely than tech department managers to conclude that they have “other, more pressing priorities” to pursue than disaster recovery initiatives. They’re also less likely to support an outsourcing or partnership model for these efforts. “Sometimes, organizations don’t realize the importance of IT disaster recovery planning until it’s too late,” according to the report. “With data being the most important financial asset and service being the most important reputational asset, why wouldn’t you protect your business against technology disruptions?

More of the Baseline article from Dennis McCafferty

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29
Aug 16

ZDNet – Delta outage highlights how airline industry needs new IT approaches

Delta blames a power outage in Atlanta for bringing its systems down, canceling flights, and stranding passengers. Southwest’s systems stumbled last month after a faulty router and nixed about 2,300 flights. United Continental grounded flights over a bad router in July and June. Welcome to the world of cobbled together legacy systems and an industry that needs to move toward cloud computing much faster.

IT outages are a fact of life. And now that technology is no longer a separate entity from business, screw-ups hit more people and damage reputations. The big question is why in 2016 airlines are being brought down by single points of failure when cloud services offer resiliency zones, backup options, and redundancy to keep critical systems running.

Delta cancels more flights as it recovers from system-wide outage | Delta Air Lines says power problems are behind computer outage that grounded flights

More of the ZDNet post from Larry Dignan

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19
Aug 16

WSJ – Failures Like the Delta Outage Are a Fact of Digital Business

Customers are still feeling the fallout from computer problems at Delta Air Lines Inc. that began with an electrical outage in the dark hours of Monday morning. Flight cancellations grew throughout the day to about 1,000 and Delta continued to cancel flights Tuesday – 680 as of 5:15 p.m. ET – as it tried to restore normal operations.

“Following the power loss, some critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to Delta’s backup systems,” the company said in a statement. Delta hasn’t gone into detail about which systems didn’t perform as expected or why. Airline reservations, maintenance and operations systems are notoriously complex, made all the more so by layers of technology integrated after years of mergers and acquisitions.

Other industries deal with such complexity but none more publicly than airlines, says Allan Frank, co-founder and chief IT strategist at The Hackett Group, which advises large companies on technology best practices. You have “multiple systems from multiple companies over a period of years, he says. “A glitch can take down the whole house… In the end, people are stuck at airports and there’s a direct, emotional impact.”

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Kim S. Nash

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20
Jul 16

Continuity Central – Majority of organizations experience downtime and service degradation due to IT capacity issues

Super interesting research on the hidden troubles associated with IT capacity.

Sumerian has published the results of its latest research, in conjunction with analyst house Freeform Dynamics. The research revealed a genuine mismatch between the IT infrastructure that businesses have in place versus what they actually need , supporting the widely held view that there is significant overspend on server capacity across industries. Worryingly, it also revealed a total mismatch between the capacity management tools and processes currently in place versus those needed to deal with this issue.

Key highlights of the research include:

76 percent of IT professionals resort to overprovisioning IT infrastructure in order to avoid capacity related issues
‘Overprovision and forget’ remains the most common approach amongst IT professionals, with the vast majority relying heavily or partially on instinct and vigilance (90 percent), system alerts and alarms (86 percent), and a range of ad hoc tools and practices (73 percent), to manage capacity in a very reactive way. As a result, less than one in five (18 percent) rated their capacity planning practices for their overall IT system resources as ‘very effective’, with others admitting they were less than ideal (54 percent), or wholly inadequate (21 percent).

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.