By ajohnson June 30, 2008 @ 2:34 pm
Do you subscribe to TechRepublic newsletters? Well I do and I noticed a section where TechRepublic listed “disaster recovery template” as one of their top searches. Curious, I popped over to their website to find out what the results were. One of the most important steps a company can take to protect themselves is to properly plan for a disaster. And planning for recovery is often a complicated and time consuming process. The good news is that there are several extensive whitepapers on the topic. Some whitepapers exceed 20 pages. However, we agree with some TechRepublic forum feedback - most DR templates are just too long and complicated for a first step.
So we decided to remedy the situation by creating a 2 page disaster recovery template that can be used to summarize a company’s most important disaster recovery information. We distilled the most important information into bite-sized chunks so that you can quickly complete the template and post it where it will be readily available in the event of a disruption.
Download it today by visiting our resource center.
By ajohnson June 9, 2008 @ 10:52 am
I’ve heard some interesting stories from customers and sales reps about where companies store their backup data. One IT Director took the weekly backup data home with him each weekend. And then one day, while he was on vacation in Mexico, there was an outage at work and there was no way to retrieve the backup data. The good intentioned IT Director wanted to offset the risk by storing the data offsite. But was his home really the safest place for the company’s data?
Today, take a moment to consider “is my backup data in a safe location?”
Flooding in Iowa,twisters in Nebraska, and power outages in Michigan are just some of the disasters making headlines this summer. If it seems that everywhere you turn, there’s a natural disaster just waiting to happen, consider getting the advise from a company like Risk Management Solutions to help you decide the safest place for your data. “RMS is the world’s leading provider of products, services, and expertise for the quantification and management of catastrophe risk.” They have several cool maps on their website including one that depicts the regions with the most risk associated with natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and hailstorms. Check it out below.
Judging by the map, Arizona is a safe place to put a datacenter for disaster recovery purposes. If you’re relying on truck-based vaulting and you don’t live in the area, perhaps AZ is impractical for storage. However, if you’re smart and relying on online backup, AZ is starting to look a lot more attractive.
Is your backup data in a safe location? 
By ajohnson June 3, 2008 @ 8:47 am
I received an email from a co-worker yesterday and thought I’d share it with you.
Subject Line: Another reason not to use truck-based vaulting services!
Besides the fact that truck-based vaulting is going to get very, very expensive because of rising fuel costs… losing tapes seems to be an increasing problem for off-site tape backup service providers.
“Bank of New York Mellon Corp. officials last week confirmed that a box of unencrypted data storage tapes holding personal information of more than 4.5 million individuals was lost more than three months ago by a third-party vendor during transport to an off-site facility,” reported Brian Fonseca from Computerworld.
Ouch!!!!!! Someone forgot the “IT 101″ of off-site tape vaulting - encrypt your tapes!!
By ajohnson June 2, 2008 @ 9:58 am
In a TechRepublic article, author Rick Vanover provides a quick disaster recovery wish list. I could just hear the legions of IT managers saying their “Amens and Halleluja’s” when reading Rick’s list.
There are 2 items that especially rang true to me.
Item number 3, “Everything starts with DR in mind” is probably the most challenging to accomplish. It’s one thing to think about disaster recovery during your nightly backup but it’s another thing to ensure all IT systems and policies comply with disaster recovery requirements. To do so requires changing the mindset of your IT department as well as your executive team. Without the support of the executive team, proper disaster recovery planning, implementation AND testing is nearly impossible to achieve.
Item #10, “All things are possible for the small environment, too.” Our mission at Simply Continuous is to create IT disaster recovery products and services for small and medium enterprises. Rick accurately describes that technologies such as virtualization have enabled the small enterprise to achieve disaster recovery objectives. However, we know that small IT departments are already taxed with doing more for less. So adding one more technology like virtualization to their list to learn can be overwhelming and take IT resources away from other mission critical activities.
For the companies who don’t have the resources to develop the domain expertise to successfully implement and maintain their virtual servers, Simply Continuous offers a managed service called AppAlive. We’re experts at virtualization so you don’t have to be.
The list is helpful when fine-tuning your existing plan or just getting started. Compare your wish list with Rick’s by visiting http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=339.
