Flirting with Disaster
Article Contributed by Dr. Robert Lai, Principal Consultant of StorageTek South Asia Pte. Ltd
7th August 2002 (NISER)
By Gopal Nair Disaster (di-'zas-t&r, -'sas-) n. - a sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction; broadly: a sudden or great misfortune or failure The aftermath of September 11th saw Manhattan's financial district reopen for business the following Monday. It was a remarkable sight for many reasons. The blocks surrounding Wall Street looked as if they had been caught in some devastating natural disaster. It had the feel of the capital of a developing country in political crisis. And there was the ash - caked up on the streets, dusting the pastries in shop windows and the Mercedes abandoned in garages. Then, there were the remnants of the towers themselves. Nevertheless, perhaps even more remarkable, was that so much still seemed to work. The New York Stock Exchange, after all, is just five blocks away from the World Trade Centre. Storage services and solutions provider, StorageTek had about 15 sites in the WTC, about 60 at ground zero, and about another 30 within a six-block radius of WTC. Within hours after the attack, StorageTek were working with their customers, bringing equipment in from out of town, and within 48 hours all StorageTek customers were back up, running, and not one lost data - they had a working Disaster Recovery Plan. For the estimated 17 percent of companies who did not have such a plan, the lost of data and business was in the realm of millions per day, all due to downtime and data lost. These companies will be the ones that constitute the hundreds of panic calls to Disaster Recovery experts two minutes following a declaration of a disaster. The majority of us think of disasters as events of similar epic proportions. However, in a world where information is business and nothing is predictable, disasters are a routine part of doing business in a world where everything moves fast and nothing is unimportant. There are countless ways for disasters to perpetuate themselves. Even relatively benign events like a street repair crew cutting off power to a building can cause disruptions to your IT infrastructure and more importantly, to your business, causing you to be down for hours, and even worse - days. When viewed as such, the importance of ensuring that you have a disaster recovery strategy is critical to your business continuity. Your strategy will make the difference to your disruption spanning minutes, hours or days and whether you can afford thousands, millions or billions of dollars in downtime. A recent report by Contingency Planning Research, listed the financial impact of application outages. This report indicates that outage costs can vary considerably by industry and application, but all outages are significant. Even an hour of downtime can be extremely costly, depending on the application. Below are the average hourly costs of a networked system failure for various application types. Brokerage operations: USD$6,500,000 Credit card/sales authorisation: USD$2,600,000 Pay-per-view: USD$150,000 TV home shopping: USD$113,000 Catalogue sales: USD$90,000 Airline reservations: USD$89,500 Telephone ticket sales: USD$69,000 Package shipping: USD$28,000 ATM fees: USD$14,500
(Source: Strategic Research Corp., 1999)
(USD$1.00 = RM3.80) Businesses who once thought that they had vibrant, robust strategies to protect business-critical information have now decided that they need dramatic overhaul in the way their data storage is handled. Business continuity for survival becomes the objective. Planning for disaster recovery involves many steps. It will not work out, if you were to think that one recovery strategy will cover all instances of failure and there are plethoras of technical solutions to help address the issues of business continuity. This ranges from simple backup with offsite storage to full hot site recovery with synchronous disk mirroring. The key to a good disaster recovery strategy is for businesses to understand the potential impact of an interruption to normal business operations and plan towards maintaining business continuity. Disaster recovery experts will encourage you to undertake a full Business Impact Analysis to quantify the potential impact, and identify which applications and services need to be restored with the highest priority. This analysis will also determine the timeframe in which recovery of these applications must be achieved before significant damage to the business occur. It will also illustrate the price of your business downtime. Finally
Interruptions to business operations can be sudden, dramatic, widespread and costly. Developing and maintaining a business continuance plan is your insurance. Develop a business impact analysis using disaster recovery planning expertise, to prioritise systems' importance to the business operations. Design a continuation strategy based on recovery requirements for the most critical processes and applications. Use a full hierarchy of storage and storage management techniques for maximum value. Consider all the risks to business interruption, including local hardware and software failures through regional interruptions. Test, practice and refine the plan.
The best possible solution should consider both the immediate problems and the future of your data centre as well. Recovery platforms are also the platforms that will keep you competitive in the future as additional capabilities are delivered. Choose solutions that augment today's implementations with a platform that positions you for even better possibilities for the future. Start now to develop and deploy a viable business continuance plan, and plan for success. |
