A RES-Q™ Whitepaper
Protecting Your Business A Winning Strategy
by: Tim Seguy, Executive Director of Solutions Engineering
A RES-QTM Disaster Recovery Whitepaper
Protecting Your Business - A Winning Strategy
Businesses are depending on information systems more heavily
than ever before to operate efficiently and competitively. At the
same time, increasingly stringent and quickly evolving regulatory
requirements underscore the importance of a formal disaster
recovery and business continuity strategy. Interestingly, most
businesses are at risk - in many instances, having no plans or
provisions in place to safeguard business operations in the event
of an unexpected incident. Not too long ago, reverting to manual
processes was an acceptable practice and part of a service
interruption plan. For instance, in a hospital setting, caregivers
kept paper charts in parallel with emerging electronic records to
treat patients. In today’s environment, caregivers rely almost
entirely on electronic records to treat patients and have all but
forgotten how to revert to the manual ways of providing care.
Healthcare is not the only business that is seeing this
transformation as the next generation of knowledge workers
leave colleges and universities specifically trained to leverage IT
systems to perform their trade.
Procrastinating on a business continuity/disaster recovery
strategy is no longer a viable option as the speed of business
continues to intensify and the dependency on the systems that
allow us to run efficient organizations increases. Factor in a
regulatory engine that is seeking to hold entities accountable for
data privacy, accessibility, and sustainability and we have a
perfect storm. This whitepaper explores an approach for
companies that are seeking to improve their position relative to
the protection of their business functions and the systems that
support them.
Procrastinating on a business continuity
strategy is no longer a viable option as the
speed of business continues to intensify.
afford a big bang approach to DR often fail in execution due to the
scope and magnitude of the project. Consider setting forth the
expectation that DR is a way of life that requires care and feeding
to continuously grow the capability. Software development and
process improvement methodologies have for years adopted an
approach of continuous improvement and capability maturity.
These methodologies lay a foundation that supports continually
evolving capability as the maturity and institutionalization of
processes grab hold while at the same time spreading the cost of
a major initiative into digestible phases. The same philosophies
can be leveraged when contemplating a BC/DR strategy. In many
cases, embarking on a BC/DR strategy is a result of a specific event
– news of a recent natural disaster, exposure as a result of an
audit, the prospect of man-made threats, etc... We often tend to
treat the symptom rather than seek to understand the underlying
root cause of WHY we are doing this and WHAT requirements will
satisfy the business needs – in the case of BC/DR, a bit of planning
and strategy goes a long way.
I. Build a Governance Structure
TOP
EXECUTIVES
PUBLIC
RELATIONS
EXECUTIVE
INTERFACE
COMMAND
Let’s face it – Business continuity and disaster recovery is often
viewed as insurance and most BC/DR proposals are left riddled
with holes on the boardroom table due to the sticker shock that
accompanies them. The reality is that even companies that can
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II. Partner Selection
Selecting the right partner to help mediate
internal discussions and walk through a
proven outcome driven methodology is
paramount.
An external perspective often helps take an objective view when
debating the importance and classification of a system, business
process, or function. Furthermore, having external participation
and someone who holds no perceived biases to disseminate the
findings often helps with the internal approval process. Seek
partners who have a vendor agnostic view of technology and can
also adapt to the unique nature of your business. Finding a partner
that is specialized in the BC/DR business is also critical given that a
broad experience base in the field will provide perspective on how
similar companies have implemented various solutions.
A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) will not only help your entire
organization better understand the interdependencies of various
systems and processes, it will also define Recovery Time Objective
(RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) goals that you can
measure your program against. These are the fundamental
metrics that will help derive a BC/DR strategy that accurately
matches business requirements. In many cases, this exercise pays
for itself in the savings it brings to a business in terms of
alternatives that become available based on a complete
knowledge of application prioritization and recovery tolerances.
The BIA should serve as a foundation for
your BC/DR program as well as a
navigational chart to reach your ultimate
destination.
An ancillary benefit is that the discovery process provides your
business owners an opportunity to interact with their peers and
work together to prioritize elements that are truly critical to keep
the business operating in the worse possible situation. The BIA
should serve as a foundation for your BC/DR program as well as a
navigational chart to reach your ultimate destination.
BCP
LOGISTICS/
SUPPORT
SAFETY/
SECURITY
KEY STAFF
PLANNING
OPERATIONS
III. Establishing a Plan and Strategy
BR
FINANCIAL/
ADMIN.
FACILITIES
BR
TRANS.
BR
HR, ETC.
BR
L.T. SUPPORT
L.T. RECOVERY
Figure 1: The Incident Command System Model
Adopting a Maturity Model Approach
governing committee with the goal of keeping them informed as
to the evolution of the program and to help mitigate significant
issues that are keeping the project from moving forward.
Depending on the size of your organization, the numbers of
stakeholders will vary, but having a core team will send a clear
message that this initiative is important to the business.
If you are serious about embarking on a DR strategy, make sure
you have the right team in place to support your success. Typically,
this involves a working committee and an oversight committee.
For the working committee, identify key stakeholders that can
answer detailed business and technical questions relative to your
business. In addition, select a few senior leaders to serve as your
Businesses have their unique nuances and complexities - they
vary in size (revenue), number of employees, types of customers
they serve, sensitivity of information they handle, regulatory and
political climate that they operate within, and level of risk they
are willing to absorb. These nuances are all factors that need to
be evaluated when approaching how to adequately protect the
business against unsuspecting threats. Many businesses avoid
this step due to fear of cost and time only to realize that this step
is critical in making sound business decisions.
How will you know if you have successfully
achieved your BC/DR goals? It is tough to
manage what you can’t measure.
www.resqdr.com
03
A RES-QTM Disaster Recovery Whitepaper
Choosing the Right Strategy
As an IT industry we have created our own worst nightmares in
terms of complexities. Heterogeneous technologies abound that
require different solutions to protect information and facilitate
the flow of information. This condition has resulted in astronomical
costs to deliver marginal RTO/RPOs. Part of the planning exercise
should include evaluations of the cost/benefits of consolidation at
various layers of the IT stack (application, compute, storage, and
networking). Trimming the fat on the front end will pay dividends
when rolling out a solution - why would you need to account for a
system that you can make obsolete by consolidating? This
approach will also inevitably streamline the process and people
requirements associated with the delicate ecosystem of
applications that need to be restored in any given tier. This should
also be where your DR partner comes in to help differentiate myth
from reality and provide a vendor agnostic view of the various
options available given the circumstance, business requirements,
and technology outlook.
Cold Site, Warm Site, Hot Site, Cloud, Hybrid?
Everyone likes options, but which one is
right for you?
HIGH
DISASTER RECOVERY
SERVICES
Parallel Operations or Load Balancing
Mirroring
Journaling
COMPLEXITY
Vaulting
Co-location
Traditional Hotsite
Quick Ship
Mobile
Many factors come into play when determining an ideal BC/DR
strategy and the associated technologies that facilitate your
desired RTO/RPO. These include prioritizing applications,
financial considerations, and risk tolerance. The good news is
that a “one shoe fits all” approach is not required nor advisable.
In fact, a hybrid approach typically provides for an ideal balance
between cost and time and a solution that addresses all the
requirements identified in the business impact analysis. Some
aspects of your business may be good candidates for cloud
services, while others are better candidates for on-site or
managed service options. Applications requiring aggressive RTO/
RPO requirements may require “hot” or “warm” technology
solutions, while applications with more relaxed requirements
might offer more cost effective technology options.
The introduction of virtualization
technologies, which offers abstractions from
physical equipment, has opened many
exciting and cost effective alternatives to
traditional disaster recovery offerings.
The introduction of virtualization technologies, which offers
abstractions from physical equipment, has opened many exciting
and cost effective alternatives to traditional disaster recovery
offerings. Virtualization not only allows for consolidation of
hardware resources, but provides for improved methods of
backup and streamlined recovery processes. Recovery of a
virtual environment can also be automated and orchestrated to
significantly reducing the time and resources required to recover
an environment. Consider how virtualization plays into your BC/
DR strategy and the benefits it can bring to both your production
and recovery environments.
React
HIGH AVAILABILITY
SERVICES
LOW
MINUTES
HIGH
HOURS
DAYS
DISASTER TOLERANCE
WEEKS
LOW
Figure 2: Recovery Option Analysis and its Relation to Cost – The
faster the time necessary to recover from a disaster, the greater
the solution cost will be to the business.
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longer able to keep up with the demands of big data and
associated recovery objectives. Analyzing the way we generate
and consume data leads to exciting new ways to manage the data
without sacrificing our ability to recover quickly from a disaster.
Not all data is created equally, nor does it have the same value to
the business. For instance, sensitive medical or financial data
carries a different value than a document containing the
company’s holiday schedule. To that end, these documents need
to be handled, stored, and protected differently. In addition,
removing inactive data from the traditional backup stream
enables us to reduce backup windows while significantly reducing
the costs associated with managing backups.
A knowledgeable partner with a broad technology background
can help you navigate the various options available given today’s
technology while also helping you define an approach that helps
your organization along the BC/DR maturity continuum.
Executing and Maintaining
The best laid plans will do you no good without proper
execution. While this may seem obvious and goes without
saying, we see all too often where backups are not validated,
recovery plans are not kept updated, and DR strategies not
exercised and measured against goals (remember those RTO/RPO
objectives?). Table top exercises do wonders to identify people
and process issues in an abbreviated timeframe without having to
go through a formal exercise. This is a cost effective way to perform
a “spot check” of your preparedness levels. A formal annual test of
your DR strategy should be completed in order to rehearse and
improve the maturity of your program. Large environments may
elect to adopt a round robin approach to testing whereby a subset
of applications are rehearsed until the entire environment has
been completely tested, repeating the cycle from the beginning
based on the desired cadence. The point of the matter is that
there are many options for testing, so there should be no excuses
on why not to validate your level of preparedness.
Not all data is created equally, nor does it
have the same value to the business.
With the exponential growth of electronic data we must examine
new approaches to managing and protecting large volumes of
data in order to align with aggressive recovery time and recovery
point objectives. Traditional tape based backup solutions are no
Figure 3: Best Practices Methodolgy
Summary
Building a successful, lasting, and cost effective DR strategy is not
a trivial undertaking; however, taking a building block approach
and finding the right partner are critical milestones in the journey.
The right partner will enter into discussions that really seek to
understand your business needs and constraints in order to
develop a solution that addresses all your requirements. Consider
the rapidly changing technological landscape and alternative
means of achieving your goals while also simplifying your overall
IT environment. Finally, focus on execution and make the
commitment to rehearse your plan at least annually. Technology
has given rise to many cost effective and simple options that
open the door for many organizations that thought a BC/DR
strategy was unattainable – this is no longer the case!
Building a successful, lasting, and cost effective
DR strategy is not a trivial undertaking;
however, taking a building block approach and
finding the right partner are critical milestones
in the journey.
www.resqdr.com
05
A RES-QTM Disaster Recovery Whitepaper
Corus360 delivers infrastructure solutions, recovery and professional services that help
organizations reduce costs, increase efficiencies and maximize productivity.
Seamlessly recover
and restore the functionality
of your infrastructure
following a disaster.
Efficiently traverse the
complexities of today’s
dynamic business
environments.
• Server Solutions
• Storage Solutions
• RES-Q™ High Availability Solutions
• Virtualization Technology
• RES-Q™ Consulting
• Networking Solutions
• RES-Q™ Recovery Solutions
• Data Protection
01 Infrastructure
Solutions
02 Recovery
Architectural Design
and Planning Services
04 Professional
03 Managed
Services
Services
• Systems Management
• Managed Security
• Storage Services
• Monitoring Services
• Network Services
• Replication Services
Outsource your
infrastructure and its services.
Gain efficiencies
and reduce costs.
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Services
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•
•
•
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ABOUT CORUS360
Corus360 is a technology consulting and solutions company with over 10 years of success helping clients
better leverage technology investments to satisfy strategic and tactical business requirements. Our team
of consultants and engineers hail from all major industries and average over fifteen years of experience
in performance improvement and sustainability, IT operations and enterprise technologies.
Corus360 helps organizations solve business problems, reduce costs and enhance efficiency by devising,
recommending and deploying business-aligned technology solutions. Corus360 applies proven
methodologies that, in aggregate, help organizations reduce risk, respond more quickly to business
challenges and better utilize assets through the full technology lifecycle.
ABOUT RES-Q™
RES-Q™ Disaster Recovery Services is a full service provider of disaster recovery and business continuity
solutions. RES-Q™ specializes in helping businesses recover and restore IT infrastructure functionality
following a disaster, offering a range of affordable and tailored program options. RES-Q™ solution
offerings include; on-site Data Recovery Testing, Data Vaulting and Managed Services.
RES-Q™ Disaster Recovery specialists carry extensive experience and knowledge in disaster recovery,
making them an accountable and trusted partner. With access to a vast inventory, RES-Q™ is able to
deliver solutions quickly, minimizing disaster-related business interruptions. The combination of
affordable pricing, flexible agreement terms and experience make RES-Q™ a one-stop shop for all disaster
recovery needs.
Microsoft Consulting Services
Mobility
Remote360
IBM Solutions
IT Strategy
Project Management
Staff Augmentation
Meet and exceed your
business goals by leveraging
our consulting services.
www.resqdr.com
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RES-Q TM | A Corus360 Company | 130 Technology Pkwy | Norcross, GA 30092 | 770-300-4700 | www.resqdr.com