Recover from a non-disaster

Just a quick link to a good article over at SearchDataCenter.com. It is from Bill Peldzus and titled "Are you operationally ready to recover from a non-disaster?"

Check it out here

HP Videos

HP can sure make some cheezy videos with their marketing budget. I think the first one is a bit old, but I thought I would post it anyway. It is the XP24000 disk array and the HP research team is simulating a data center fail over for disaster recovery by blowing up the primary data center. Check out this video, complete with hollywood narration, here.

Looking for something a bit more silly? ok.....

Business Discontinuity

The Data Center Journal has a nice article on " Business Discontinuity – 5 Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them". To summarize, the 5 mistakes are:

1. Appointing the Incident Management Team late
2. Assuming the incident will happen at 2am on a Sunday morning
3. Assuming muster points will be available
4. Trying to scare senior management into addressing BCM
5. Forgetting about the importance of employee awareness

check out the article here

Value of Business Continuity Planning

Twin Cities Business Magazine has a nice article on BCP and a couple of case studies. It profiles two companies and their approach to BCP and discusses BIA (business impact analysis).

The good news is that when companies are able to put a dollar value or ranking on the potential impact of various events on their business, they generally find that the number is far higher than the investment required to fund a business continuity plan.

Check out the article here

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.