DediPower Selected to Host Crisis Pro

Just a quick link to a DataCentres.com article. It covers UK Managed Hosting provider DediPower being selected by Risk Analysis Services to host Crisis Pro - a business continuity program.

Check it out here

Virtualization Used for BCP

Virtualization continues in 2008 to be a hot topic, as blogs are full of posts about it, new products continue to emerge, mergers of virtualization-related companies take place, and studies dig into the technology.

A recent Computer Associates-sponsored, independent study surveyed 300 CIOs of large companies around the world. The published results have a ton of interesting statistics about virtualization and future uses and concerns for the technology. For BCP purposes -the two interesting statistics were:

1. 34% (worldwide) said that the current use of virtualization was to "Support business continuity disaster recovery".
2. That same response was listed by 45% of respondents for the planned use of virtualization use 18 months from now.

Slides can be found here

and an article about the study on the Contingency Planning and Management site here

Definitions - Part 2

Continuing the definitions...courtesy of DRJ.com:

RTO (Recovery Time Objective): The period of time within which systems, applications, or functions must be recovered after an outage (e.g. one business day). RTO’s are often used as the basis for the development of recovery strategies, and as a determinant as to whether or not to implement the recovery strategies during a disaster situation.

RPO (Recover Point Objective): The maximum amount of data loss an organization can sustain during an event.

I may go on with some other BCP and DR terms, but next on my agenda is to cover the difference between BCP and DR. I have frequently heard the terms used interchangeably and they aren't / shouldn't be.

To start -- here is a link to an InformIT Reference guide that does a good job of explaining the difference.

Definitions - Part I

As promised....here is some Lingo 101 for BCP and DR.

Since reading Disaster Recovery magazine is partially responsible for maintaining my interest in the disaster recovery industry, I thought I would reference them to help with defining some of the terminology. The following definitions come from their excellent glossary. Since my primary blog covers data centers I felt it was only appropriate to start with some DR terminology as it relates to how data centers can be used.
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Cold Site: an alternate facility that already has in place the environmental infrastructure required to recover critical business functions or information systems, but does not have any pre-installed computer hardware, telecommunications equipment, communication lines, etc. These must be provisioned at time of disaster.

Warm Site: an alternate processing site which is equipped with some hardware, and communications interfaces, electrical and environmental conditioning which is only capable of providing backup after additional provisioning, software or customization is performed.

Hot Site: An alternate facility that already has in place the computer, telecommunications, and environmental infrastructure required to recover critical business functions or information systems.

Welcome!

Welcome to my BCP (Business Continuity Planning) Links blog!!

BCP and DR (Disaster Recovery) have always been an interest of mine and something that I wanted to learn more about. I plan on this blog being my way to learn about BCP and DR concepts while (hopefully) pointing others interested in the topic to useful news, knowledge and trends in the industry.

So.....pardon the basics, but just in case any readers come across this and want to start with the VERY basic concept, let's turn to the encyclopedia(Wikipedia):

Business Continuity Planning:

an interdisciplinary peer mentoring methodology used to create and validate a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a predetermined time after a or extended disruption. The logistical plan is called a Business Continuity Plan

Disaster Recovery

the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations critical to the resumption of business, including regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, toll-free, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human-induced disaster.

To begin I may set out and try to find some other definitions of BCP and DR, just to see how other experts or trusted sources define the concept. After that I want to dig into some of the primary terminology used when discussing these two things; such as impact analysis, hot site, warm site, cold site, RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Next I will most likely dig into the magazines, portals and other blogs on the topic and finally I may narrow my focus to data centers and wide area networks - as they relate to BCP.

I promise not to dwell on the basics for too long -- but please comment if there is something you are interested in learning more on that I maybe didn't spend a lot of time on. Writing this particular blog is my way of learning more on the topic and industry as well as discovering the vast amount of information out there.

-John