Disaster Recovery Experts Speak Out (continued) 8

Re: disaster recovery
by Bob Williamson (09-Nov-01 3:25 PM GMT)

Nancy, Pay a visit to www.disasterrecoveryworld.com. There are resources available to get you started. And don't forget, your plan needs to include recovery plans for losses of each of the following:

+ compute hardware
+ business critical data
+ business critical applications
+ people
+ facilities

Good luck on the proposal. Drop me a personal email if I can help.

Re: disaster recovery
by peeps (09-Nov-01 3:28 PM GMT)

Do you have specific time frames defined for different types or sources of data

Re: disaster recovery
by Jim Johnson (09-Nov-01 6:19 PM GMT)

Hi Warren,

We currently working on a new approach to DR called CPA that looks the pros and cons of the current offerings.

Traditional disaster recovery plans cannot keep up with the speed of doing business in today's world. A 24-hour recovery time from a disaster would be enough to put many companies out of business.

According to the participants in The Standish Group's latest focus groups, most say their disaster recovery strategy is woefully inadequate, and that their disaster recovery plans are out-of-date and provide for minimal coverage. This coverage basically includes having their legacy applications run on their mainframe or proprietary systems. Very few disaster recovery plans go much deeper into the application suite. The focus group participants estimate their coverage to be about 10% of their critical applications. According to the latest DARTS, 60% of all critical applications operate 24/7. That is precisely why corporations are moving away from disaster recovery to replicated data and processing. But this falls short as well. Instead, what is needed is an architectural approach to the problem. That solution is Continuous Processing Architecture (CPA).

We would be glad to work with you on your project.

Re: DR & BCP is stupid
by Martin Garvey (09-Nov-01 10:47 PM GMT)

Thanks Jim. With more room, we would have had this in our backup the backup story. IT leads business continuity plans at most companies. Clearly, they should continue protecting apps and data, but be sure to work closely with business managers in covering facilities management, personnel policies, intellectual property, internal communication procedures for employees, and accounting for personnel and human safety.

Re: DR & BCP is stupid
by Larry Greenemeier (09-Nov-01 7:48 PM GMT)

I couldn't help but be pulled in by your inflammatory headline. I've been writing about the outsourcing side of disaster recovery and business continuity for InformationWeek for the past two years, and I've come across resistance to the notion DR and BCR before. You make some valid points, particularly about disaster recovery being seen as insurance. I'm sure it's hard to justify spending $300,000 per year on something you hope you'll never use. And I agree that the word "disaster" makes some people uncomfortable, hence the transition to phrases like "business recovery" and "business continuity".

As to your point about looking beyond products toward logistics and services, that's where I've focused. I've spoken with several companies over the past two months who have brought up the problem of where users go in the event of a disaster. As the New York's financial district found out, there's more to business recovery than back-end systems. Workers were displaced to NYC's outer boroughs as well as New Jersey, and in some cases there weren't enough desktops to go around.

In my opinion, it's too early to tell just what impact September 11 will have on preparedness. Perhaps we'll see executives within companies emerge who are dedicated to disaster recovery, oops, emergency preparedness. Someone along the lines of a Chief Continuity Officer or VP of IT Preparedness. My two cents.