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Brian Hodge
Processor.com
March 12, 2010
Full text of original article at Processor.com web site

Activate Your DR Plan

When The Worst Happens, What Next?

Disasters come in many forms, from natural (earthquakes and floods) to manmade (viruses and sabotage) to just plain rotten luck (equipment breakdown). But they all have one thing in common: the potential to bring a business to its knees. The penalties for an inadequate response can be severe.

“Figures show that the longer your systems are down, the more likely you’re putting your business in jeopardy of completely failing,” says Marc Mombourquette, product marketing manager for Acronis (www.acronis.com).

Here are several strategies and tactics for running an effective disaster recovery.

 Remember The Key Objective

A disaster scenario may involve many unique details, but the top priority of any DR plan should always be the same: Return the enterprise to a state in which it can resume its core business, and access its essential data, as soon as possible.

Keep that uppermost in mind and, as you address the crisis, you’ll be better able to separate mission-critical tasks from secondary objectives. The company’s survival may depend on your ability to prioritize.

“If it’s a critical infrastructure piece, like if [you’re] an ecommerce provider and your credit card processing database is down, then the entire business comes to a stop,” Mombourquette says. “So getting that up and running again would be viewed as critical.”

Once key functionality is restored, then you can address the things that can wait until later, such as rebuilding mailboxes.

 When Possible, Get Ahead Of The Situation

Some disasters you can anticipate—a coming storm, for example—with time to prepare for the worst. In a case like this, preemptive action can mitigate a disaster’s impact, saving work and downtime later on.

This may require relocating as much system hardware as possible to move to a safe location or switching data operations over to run out of a secondary location.

“In an event like [Hurricane] Katrina, if you had a backup, you could’ve moved it over to another server in the middle of the country,” says Mombourquette.

A key factor when formulating any disaster plan is to determine the maximum amount of time the enterprise can go without having access to its data. Thus, as soon as the company has a declared emergency, the clock is ticking, with a target time you need to come in under.

This is a high-pressure situation, and when the pressure is on, you’re more likely to remain on track by sticking to predefined goals that remain the same, no matter what. Beyond a few basic variables of forewarning and employee safety, the specifics of a disaster shouldn’t factor into the core recovery process.

David Wilson, director of IT services for Vector CSP (www.vectorcsp.com), stresses the need for simplicity all around: “Having a huge plan with a lot of delegation and planned roles will bog down what needs to be a smoothly oiled machine. Keep the crucial items clear and separate from secondary concerns and enact safeguards to prevent the necessity of split-second reaction later.”

 Utilize Your Backup

The most vital resource you’ll have at your disposal is, of course, your most current data backup. It will be invaluable to business continuity if getting operational again doesn’t have to rely on, and wait for, ferreting out a problem and fixing it.

“Our data and servers are redundant. If one source fails, I can bring another online within minutes,” Wilson says. “I run the company using a form of directory replication and comparison for backup. I have identical copies of crucial data on servers in two states and on several external hard drive sources. I can remove operations from one or the other of the two states and be fully up and running in the other.”

Making a secondary system primary will also provide breathing room to repair or replace affected hardware components or track down and isolate the cause of a problem.

Acronis’ Mombourquette is an advocate of disc image-based backup, not only for the consolidation it offers but also because of its flexibility for system recovery, and mounting the image to run as a virtual machine, if necessary.

“You’re able to recover an entire system, or pieces of it, or data pieces of it, or even recover to different hardware,” he says. “I can have a disk image up and running in minutes, rather than hours or days. If you have to rebuild [the server] by hand, think about all the patches you have to do, all the policies you have to rebuild, not to mention all the data that you may or may not have backed up.”

 Limit Contact To Key People

As soon as it appears that you are past the worst of the crisis, you’ll have to obtain feedback from the employees who rely on the data you’re restoring, to make sure they in fact do have what they need. However, consulting too broadly can muddy the waters again just as they’re starting to clear.

“Once data sharing and communications were restored, I’d contact the various department heads to have them inventory and assess the files from backup or the external source to insure completeness,” Wilson says. “The persons most likely to know the structure of a fix would be our directors and project leads, so that is who I’d communicate through. If I allow the entire company in unbuffered, I’ll be ineffectual in assessing and repairing damage.”

Mombourquette proposes having a three-point checklist to go through after running a DR plan before you can announce that you’ve reached the all-clear point: Is the system operating again and all your data back up? Have you determined the root cause of the problem? Have you fixed it and undertaken preventive measures to keep it from happening in the future?

When disaster strikes, you may have no control over the events themselves, but you do have control of how you respond to them. A swift, clear-headed implementation of your DR plan can mean the difference between an outage that puts the business’s very survival in peril, and an event whose repercussions are negligible.