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DR/BC
Not so continuous
Small organisations do not take their DR/BC plans seriously
and are satisfied with traditional backups to secure their data. By Kushal
Shah
Disasters such as fire, earthquake, terrorist attacks, theft and event like
26/7 strikes without notifying anybody. Catastrophic events cause immense damage
when they occur. In such a scenario, for any organisation, it is important to
recover with minimal loses incurred. Organisations need to keep running irrespective
of any hiccups occurred on their way by saving their data and running critical
processes with minimal downtime.
The concept of business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) is new for
small organisations. They well know the importance of backing up data but do
little to tackle the problem. Only 18 percent out of 197 companies surveyed
have taken care of this problem. The situation is risky for businesses which
requires heavy uptime and have critical data. Another large scale disaster and
businesses are bound to come to a stand still. For most organisations in this
segment, terms such as warm, hot and cold sites are alien. The only thing they
are aware of is the need to backup data on to optical media such as CDs or DVDs.
Few had defined processes. They need to be educated as to the importance of
taking care of data and continuously running the business; without which they
cannot achieve what they dream of, becoming a large organisation to compete
globally.
While it is a fact that small businesses have correspondingly small IT budgets
for such operations and their businesses are not always time critical, yet it
is better to practise such scenarios now when you have a small business than
to cry later when you have grown substantially and have no time to integrate
your applications to perform such exercise.
Look at the statistics
There is no business which can tolerate loss of data, but growing mobility is
emerging as one of the threats with loss of data becoming a big problem. Stolen
laptops are a major reason for this. Looking at such incidents one needs to
back up data on static machines so that they can roll back from some point at
least if not fully.
Statistics about the seriousness of this issue are astonishing. The best ratio
of DR/BC planning was found in IT and ITES companies with only about 55 percent
of them have defined policies. Only 29 companies out of 197 had business continuity
planning in place which was definitely a problem to worry about. Only half of
them had defined their recovery objectives.
If IT and ITES has such poor infrastructure for DR/BC, you can well imagine
the situation in other verticals. The second best in case of a disaster was
the chemical & pharmaceutical industry. 17 percent of the surveyed companies
of this type had infrastructure in place for DR/BC. They didn’t give much
importance to data backup but showed interest in implementing well defined tools
to do the job. “We take weekly backup of important data and I think data
should be a prime requisite of any organisation,” says LM Kaushal, Deputy
Director, Arbro Pharmaceuticals of Delhi.
The least process and data dependent sector was manufacturing
& engineering with only 9 percent having defined DR/BC plans. Some of the
companies in this segment seemed quite interested in this concept and the seriousness
of the same. Roots Industries Ltd in Coimbatore had a full fledged IT system
in place with consideration given to DR sites and ambitious plans to tackle
such unavoidable scenarios in the future.
What do they have?
Time taken by the system to roll back to a predetermined point was not given
due importance. The main priority was to keep copies of data and not continuing
the businesses. It was pretty much OK for them to have downtime.
The tape drive, one of the best friends of small business IT department, emerges
as the best seller for backing up the data. Almost every organisation used tapes
as their means to back up data. Considering their budgets, it was pretty acceptable
since tapes are one of the cheapest storage devices as compared to full fledged
organised DR/BC operations which are certainly way above their budget and to
an extent not needed if the only use of computers is to create Word and Excel
files.
Like most other, Amri Hospitals in Kolkata used tape drives to back up their
all data including that of patient records. These backup are such that it would
take less than an hour to get work started in case of a failure.
These methods are used more like an archival of data than a real-time data recovery
plan. For ETV Gujarat, business continuity was other term for keeping the Internet
connection up and running all the time.
According to some consultants, the best solution for SMB for DR/BC is disk-to-disk-tape;
which is relatively cheap and serves the purpose well. Very few companies have
implemented such a structure. St. Marks Hotel in Bangalore had a three tier
architecture deployed for backing up the data and to keep the business running.
“We have our data stored in SQL Server and from there it goes to another
server as backup and to keep it running. Another copy of this data is stored
at a remote location,” says Balachander, Manager, St. Marks Hotel. Retrieval
of data from remote site takes about six to 48 hours whereas access of data
from the server is almost instantaneous.
A similar exercise was followed by S L Raheja Hospital based in Mumbai. They
used to ship SQL logs to an internal server and from there backup was taken
on tape. Usually their data was in the form of Word documents. In case of a
catastrophic event, roll back time is one hour and if it is only a software
error than it will not take more than five minutes for data to come back.
10 to 12 Excel files a day certainly do not need a three tier structure for
backup. Considering that Jyothy Gas Pvt. Ltd of Bangalore just backs up the
data onto CD-Rs and uses it only when some failure occurs on a machine.
Roots Industries has an ordinary DR/BC system at present with storage devices
such as USB and tapes but they are all set to look at NAS and SAN implementations
in the near future. It is set to have a dedicated site for its backup which
currently takes about 2 hours to recover from a failure. “We are looking
into organised tools for DR/BC but presently tapes and USBs are coming as much
cheaper options. These days USBs are available in 80 and 100GB configuration
at low cost of about Rs. 500 for a 1GB stick,” says OA Balasubramaniam,
General Manager- IT, Roots Industries.
Some used the facility provided by the IBM servers to keep their business secured
and running. “We use the mirror image facility provided by IBM servers
to take an immediate back up and which is later replicated on secondary devices,”
says Siddhartha Banerjee, IT Manager, SMIFS Capital Marketing, Kolkata.
Small companies usually have relatively simple applications running. Tally was
the most common application running across this segment and some used FoxPro.
Few organisations relied only on the internal backup facility of such software
and didn’t bother to use tape drives and instead preferred CDs or DVDs
for backing up the critical files. Some backed up data on daily basis and some
did it only weekly or monthly, depending the criticality of the data they used
or produced.
Needs deferred, ways deferred but ultimate goal for almost everybody remained
same which was that of saving data critical to their businesses. All needed
guidance to secure their operations in the cheapest and the best manner.
- Pre-planning activities (project initiation)
In this phase one needs to analyse the present computing environment
of the organisation. This enables the project team to refine the scope
of the project and the associated work programme; develop project schedules;
and identify and address any issues that could have an impact on the
delivery and the success of the project.
- Vulnerability assessment
In this phase, team has to concentrate on activities that can reduce
the possibility of disaster occurrence, rather than concentrating primarily
on minimising impact of an actual disaster. This phase addresses measures
to reduce the probability of occurrence.
- Business impact assessment (BIA)
BIA of all business units that are part of the business environment
enables the project team to identify critical systems, processes and
functions; assess the economic impact of incidents and disasters that
result in a denial of access to system services and other services and
facilities; and assess the ‘pain threshold,’ that is, the
length of time business units can survive without access to systems,
services and facilities.
- Detailed definition of requirements
During this phase, a profile of recovery requirements is developed.
The profile is developed by identifying resources required to support
critical functions identified earlier. This profile should include hardware
(mainframe, data and voice communications and personal computers), software
(vendor supplied, in-house developed, etc), documentation, user, procedures),
outside support (public networks), facilities (office space, office
equipment, etc) and personnel for each business unit.
- Plan development
During this phase, recovery plan components are defined and plans
are documented. This phase also includes the implementation of changes
to user procedures, upgrading of existing data processing operating
procedures required to support selected recovery strategies and alternatives,
vendor contract negotiations (with suppliers of recovery services) and
the definition of recovery teams, their roles and responsibilities.
Recovery standards are also to be developed during this phase.
- Initial plan testing and implementation
Once plans are developed, initial tests of the plans are conducted
and any necessary modifications to the plans are made based on an analysis
of the test results. Specific activities of this phase include defining
the test purpose /approach, identifying test teams; structuring the
test; conducting the test; analysing test results; and modifying the
plans as appropriate. After this, the plan is executed and the system
is made available to the organization for data recovery.
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Need to know
Disaster recovery services can help companies recover from virtually any type
of disaster ensuring availability of mission-critical resources. An organisation
of any size must have a well defined plan to tackle disaster of any size.
Disaster recovery planning is about being proactive and not just reacting to
an event that occurs. It is not about implementing a software package and sitting
ideal. It’s a continuous process. In case of disaster, organisation should
respond by resuming critical business functions within a defined time frame,
minimising loss, and restoring affected areas.
The primary objective of the plan is to enable an organisation to survive a
disaster and to resume normal business operations. In order to survive with
minimal loss, an organisation must ensure that critical operations can resume
within a reasonable timeframe. Therefore, the aim of a business resumption plan
should be to identify weaknesses and implement a disaster prevention programme,
minimise the duration of a serious disruption to business operations, and most
importantly reduce complexity of the recovery effort. The recovery should be
automated as much as possible. If you go out shopping for tools for such operations
you will land up surrounded by uncountable options. The difficulty comes in
choosing the right one according to your budget and needs. For this, one needs
to analyse the importance of their business data and criticality of operations
running.
Irrespective of the kind of business you do, continuing the work in the worst
possible situation is the need for the hour in order to grow at the fastest
pace. In order to achieve this, the small segment needs to pull up its socks
and implement a defined DR policy which suits its budget and needs.
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