No Disaster Recovery, No Excuses… New Strategies that make it affordable

Do you keep your life savings under your mattress? Of course not! I’ll bet you don’t keep all your company cash in your desk drawer. Then why would you put your business at risk by not having a disaster recovery plan for your data?


What is Disaster Recovery (DR) in a nut shell?

Disaster Recovery is the ability for an organization to recover business systems and restore data to support business operations following a disruptive event. A disruption event can be as simple as tripping over your server cord and cutting power, so don’t think it can’t happen. Just refer to disruptive events of Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and even the completely bizarre weather on the east coast this winter 2010 as very real scenarios where DR plans were deployed in a, “this is not a drill” fashion. Still don’t believe me? According to research by the University of Texas, only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, while 43 percent never reopen and 51 percent close within two years.

Here is my disclaimer!

Disaster Recovery is a huge topic that has many subsets of Risk Management and Business Continuance. I am strictly focusing on DR as it applies to IT, data protection and recovery. If you are tasked with putting together a full blown DR plan for your organization, this is a good start, but do not overlook the other critical components of enterprise risk management, physical DR and employee displacement, temporary facility plans, etc. A full DR plan extends beyond IT data protection and includes your entire organization.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is often mistakenly confused with High Availability (HA), which is a term used to define the amount of acceptable downtime a company can accept. Simply put, DR is, “can I recover my essential data and business systems”, and HA is “How fast can I recover my critical data and business systems”.

The old Paradigm broken

The simple idea of DR is nothing new to the large enterprise. The problem is, under the old paradigm, DR costs can be viewed in terms of millions of dollars. In the ancient days of IT dating back to the early second millennium, it was very costly to put together a DR environment. An organization would have to replicate the entire infrastructure at the DR location from servers to switches, applications, firewalls, appliances etc. This left many companies with very generic Dr methods, some only as advanced than a tape backup sent offsite and stored in the IT manager’s underwear drawer.

The new Paradigm… (Strategies that make it affordable)

Here are a few examples from the “very simple” to “very reliable yet affordable”.

Key: SOHO (Small Office Home Office), Small Business (Small office with fee employees), SMB (Small medium business with several to many employees), SME (Small medium Enterprise with many employees over large geography), Enterprise (Very large company, global)

Simple Backups for DR (Minimal DR)

Recommended adopter: SOHO, Small Business

Cost: No Excuses cheap. If you can’t afford this, shut your doors and find a job, you’ve probably spent more on your cell phone.

Overview: An External HD’s and your operating system’s built in backup utility will give even your kid’s lemonade business the ability to have simple DR.

The Online Backup

Recommended adopter: SOHO, SMB, some strategies for SME, Enterprise branch offices

Cost: Very Cheap to Very affordable

Overview: Online backup services are an affordable way to add DR to your business AND automate your backup process. Smaller organizations can virtually “set it and forget it”. Gone are the days of constant babysitting of manual tape backups. For larger companies, online backup strategies can be deployed to backup hard to manage endpoint systems such as remote, branch office or laptop fleets.

Credible online backups services will offer secure, encrypted, semi-hands-off backup services over the internet, (aka in the cloud), to a co-location facility. These “business-class” backup services will also have fully secure and compliant, redundant systems that use high end enterprise class DR and HA infrastructure and methodologies that most smaller enterprises could never afford to deploy.

Note: It is highly recommended to avoid consumer grade online backup services for your business. They do not have the security, availability and enterprise features mentioned above to properly protect your data. Losing your mp3’s is one thing, losing your intellectual property, client lists, or accounting data is another entirely.

Enterprise DR and replication with virtualization and other cool new tools.

Recommended Adopter: SME, Enterprise

Cost: Considerably less than DR solutions of the past, and with the added ability to add HA for far less cost than mirroring your data center to two locations. A simple replication system using virtualization can start from as little as zero dollars, (using free tools like Citrix XenServer and two existing servers). Think of it this way. At the time your lost data becomes valuable enough to put you out of business, these DR strategies becomes delightfully affordable.

Overview: Recently, methodologies and concepts around virtualization, cheap and smart storage, and cloud computing, have created a paradigm shift. These concepts have given us the ability to remove data and workloads from hardware, and easily move them around to agnostic server configurations across geography, creating affordable and downright cheap Disaster Recovery.

Some vendors to look at include VMware, Marathon Technologies, Novell’s Platespin, Double Take, and Stratus Technologies. Smart Storage and SAN vendors to research may include Compellent, Dell Equallogic, Falconstor, Starwind Software, Data Core, and Dot Hill.

Next Steps

There is no such thing as a “one size fits all solution”, so be cautious of anyone who tries to sell you on a solution without a proper consultation and discovery of your business objectives. There are many different solutions and strategies out there to choose from, so take your list of excuses and roll them into a ball, wrap tape around them and use them for office baseball. That’s all excuses are good for anyway, right? Remember, there are no more excuses. Protect yourself. Protect your data.