Disaster Recovery Best PracticesPlan B Disaster Recovery Ltd

11th September 2014

Agenda

• Introduction

• Do you need IT Disaster Recovery protection?

• How best practice planning for IT disasters

• Why testing is so important

• Latest technologies

• Case studies

• Q&A

• Close

About Plan B Disaster Recovery

• Plan B is a specialist IT disaster recovery service provider.

• We have a 100% recovery record and a 100% customer satisfaction record.

• We guarantee instant recovery and availability of core business systems.

• We are technical leaders in our field pioneering Pre-recovery.

• Named Specialist Business Continuity Company of the year 2012

• We understand security & service management

• We protect large and small customers and simple and complex environments

• We provide subcontract DR services to other service providers

Why have a robust disaster recovery provision?

• Disasters do happen and particularly to IT systems!

• IT disasters are unpredictable and can effect any business

• Reliance on IT is so complete most businesses can’t operate without it and business and reputational damage quickly mount up

• 80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within 18 months*

• 90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster close within 2 years*

Why do plans and provisions often fail?

• No one wants to pay for DR.

• Tendency to be optimistic in DR planning – supported by some suppliers. Nothing will be as easy as was assumed.

• DR plans become complicated, lots of manual requirements, difficult to build and maintain and ruinously costly to test properly – so they almost never are.

Compared to the costs of a disaster a good DR provision will seem very cheap

What is the nature of an IT Disaster?

• Like all catastrophes IT disasters usually are the result of multiple failures as much as one biblical event.

• Loss of IT systems will rapidly affect and paralyse entire organisation.

• Extent of problem may be very hard to assess and most information needed to recover will be out of date or unavailable.

• The unexpected will happen.

• Uncertainty will prevent decisive business decision making.

• Many things will be harder than expected.

• Issues can multiply and crisis can quickly turn to chaos.

Best Practice in preparing a DR Plan

• Don’t start by assuming things will work.

• Focus on ‘Return to service’.

• Aim for as much certainty as possible – this will empower you and enable you to take back the initiative.

• Keep your recovery plan as simple as possible – KISS

• Automate as much of your plan as possible.

• Aim for reasonable Speed of recovery – especially for communications systems, enabling you to be more decisive and effective.

• Prioritise testing as a fundamental control.

• Review and test as an on-going process

Testing – why is it so important?

• The only way to guarantee things will work. Many fail – will yours?

• Good testing will uncover un-known issues

• Our first test recoveries generate tens to hundreds of errors which need manual intervention - this takes hours. If you haven’t carried out a full recovery exercise then you will have long recovery times.

• High amount of change happening with IT systems so testing needs to be done regularly.

• Tests should be full end to end recoveries, not just checking you can read your backup discs.

Recovery times widely interpreted - ‘Time to respond’, ‘Time to get a bootable solution’, ‘Time to meet minimum recovery objectives’ etc.

Recovery times

Clarify what recovery time means to you and set your own clear business driven objectives to be met by suppliers.

IT downtime costs can be calculated using our simple IT downtime calculator on our website. Is it cost effective to reduce your recovery time further?

Focus on ‘Return to Service’

Like all good SLAs the penalties for breaching should be meaningful.

Virtual / Cloud based recovery services

• Virtualisation has made recovering to different hardware much easier and enabled automation of the process

• Virtualisation has also made it practical to be able to syndicate use of hardware and services whilst delivering a very high service level.

• Cloud platforms potentially cut costs.

• Different offerings and different service levels

• Most use replication techniques run by the customer

• Testing still mostly manual

Affordable DR solutions that work are now possible but don’t be fooled – easier doesn’t mean it will always work.

Pre-Recovery now provides a continually tested hot standby equivalent at a much lower cost

Benefits of Pre-recovery

• Guaranteed recovery within minutes

• Simplicity - set up, on-going protection, BCP Planning

• Very cost effective

• Minimum IT down-time - Minimum business disruption

• Simple invocation process

• Puts organisations back in control rapidly

• Handle IT disaster rather than be subject to it

• Protects from operational and reputational damage

Disasters do happen – SAN Failure

20th December 2013 – Financial services customer had a degraded SAN that failed completely within 8 hours. Vendor was unable to fix within guaranteed time.

Recovery systems available within 30 minutes. Users attached via VPN immediately.

The customer ran on Plan B platform for 10 days.

Despite vendor eventually fixing the SAN customer no longer trusted the HW and Plan B provided an ‘Export server’ solution as a temporary local fix.

They were still running on the export server two months later.

• Catastrophic Hardware and to a lesser degree Software failures are a common cause of IT disasters

• Plan B solution worked quickly when everything else had failed empowering company to start solving the business issues.

• Approach enabled strategic approach for return to live

Disasters do happen – Fire 9pm, 15th April 2013 – Fire in Electrical riser caused extensive damage to the building, total loss of electrical infrastructure and smoke damage to IT equipment.

Recovery systems available within 40 minutes & 200 users attached via VPNs next morning

The business continued to service their core customers whilst IT staff started to recover live services.

The customer ran on Plan B’s recovery platform for 9 months.

They believe fire had no impact on full year results

• Pre-recovery worked quickly and easily providing all core communications and information systems within minutes empowering company to immediately start solving the business issues.

• Many uncertainties and problems that would have made any form of ‘rebuild’ style of recovery too slow and difficult.

• Approach enabled strategic approach for rebuild to live

Resources• Guide to cost vs performance • Pre-recovery whitepaper• Disaster Recovery Survey Results• DR Plan Template• IT Downtime Calculator

www.planb.co.uk@PlanB_DRinfo@planb.co.uk