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Disaster Recovery Infographic

Disaster Recovery Testing: the secret to a reliable disaster recovery plan.

In last week’s blog, I discussed the key steps businesses should take in order to create a successful disaster recovery plan (you can view the blog here). Following on from my blog, I delved deeper in to research covering disaster recovery and within my findings I discovered a shockingly low statistic;

In a study conducted in 2012 of 500 US and European SMEs, only 8% conducted regular tests of their backup and recovery process.

As you would have seen in my seven simple steps on creating a successful disaster recovery plan, the final step is to regularly carry out tests to ensure that the plan will work in a time of crisis. Just to recap, if you are not capturing the data properly during your backup, it will not recover properly after a disaster meaning you could join the 90% statistic of businesses forced to shut down within two years due to losing all of their data!

For those of you that are still not buying into this. I will help you understand the importance of data recovery testing...

• Would you leave your house without checking all your windows and doors are locked first?

• Would you ride your bike down a mountain without checking your brakes worked beforehand

• Would you throw yourself off a bungee jump without getting your harness checked first?

I have faith that you answered no to each of these and that this is because you predicted what could happen. Since disasters are unpredictable, why would you, and any other business, risk not testing the disaster recovery plan regularly?

As a result of finding out businesses are currently lacking in disaster recovery testing, I have decided that more knowledge and advice in this area needs to be shared. So this week I am going to run through the best way of successfully testing that your backup and recovery works.

Let me introduce you to:

Recovery Simulator provides reliable, automated recovery simulation for IBM’s TSM and EMC’s Networker users. Through a centralised management console the Recovery Simulator add-on for TBMR and NBMR products simulates a full recovery to a new virtual machine from a specified TSM or Networker backup to ensure that you will recover all of your business data successfully if a crisis was to happen.

Key benefits:

To view Recovery Simulator in action view the short demo: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2f0DZ6WwYI

Recovery Simulator is currently available for TBMR and NBMR products.

To find out more on how to get hold of this software or to speak to an expert, call the free phone number: +441453 847000 or send an email to: sales@cristie.com

BMR for TSM: the best is great, it’s number one. But unique is greater; it’s the only one.

Have you ever wondered what sets Cristie’s TBMR software apart from other BMR software products that are currently available for users of TSM? Well today we reveal four exclusive and unique features:

This is how we can provide such a fast and automated recovery process in less than 10 minutes! 

To find out more, please contact one of our experts on our FREE phone number: +441453 847000 or send an email to: sales@cristie.com

7 Steps on Creating a Successful Disaster Recovery Plan

According to a recent survey by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council (DRP), 72% of survey participants are failing in terms of disaster readiness. That is nearly three out of four companies worldwide!

There should be no question about it; businesses must plan for the worst. After all, life is unpredictable and you never know what is around the corner. The fact is disasters are inevitable, they creep up on you when you least expect it. If you aren't prepared they can cause havoc as well as consuming time and money trying to get the business back on track when all this could have been prevented with a simple disaster recovery plan. 

Sorry if this is sounding morbid, but the fact is too many businesses forget protecting the backbone of their success. Having spent years creating a reputation and brand image, why would you chance risking it all down the drain because you were not prepared enough? You can plead ignorance, but what use is that? You can learn from your mistake, but why wait to make the mistake when there is an easy answer to preventing losing possibly decades of building up your enterprise and social standing?

Your customers are the key to your success. They have chosen you because they have faith and trust in your service. Don’t let them down. Don’t ruin your reputation. Don’t be remembered for the business that was affected by a disaster.

To emphasize the last point, it is common knowledge that society remembers and discusses a crisis more than a successful event. In Professor Baumeister’s article in 2001, ‘Bad Is Stronger Than Good,’ he highlights the point that research has proved time and time again that bad emotions and bad feedback have more impact than good ones. Negative impressions and negative stereotypes are formed more quickly and are more resistant to dis-confirmation than positive ones.

So to reiterate my point, businesses should have a disaster recovery plan in place and I am going to share the key steps you need to take to be confident your disaster recovery plan will protect your business in the likelihood of any disaster occurring.

1. Create a team

Select employees who will form your contingency planning team. This should be based on those individuals who will bring a variety of perspectives on the company’s vulnerabilities to the table. Consider representatives from all the departments within your business, including HR, facilities and high-level managers.

2. List all names and contact details

Create a list of all employees’ names with all methods of communication for each employee and ensure that this is kept regularly updated. Communication should include personal and work email, work mobile, personal mobile, home number, pager, and the list will go on. The more ways you have to keep in touch should disaster strike, the better. 

3. Determine a chain of command

A clear chain of command and authority needs to be considered to determine who is in charge when the key personnel are missing. This enables employees to understand who to take direction from in the chaos that frequently follows a disaster.

4. Risk assessment

Make a checklist taking all sorts of possible scenarios into account about anything that could go wrong. You should then consider how each one of those situations would affect your core business, your revenue streams, your customer service and your employees.

5. Plan B

Find solutions to all the possible scenarios that may occur. If you couldn’t access your primary base of operations for an extended period of time you need to sort out a Plan B so you'll be prepared...

• If certain parts of your business shut down or were destroyed, how would you stay solvent? 
• Can your employees work from home? 
• Is there another company that would share their facilities with you temporarily until you can rent or buy space at a new location? 

Based on your company needs, determine what is needed to keep the business running if disaster strikes...

• Where would revenue come from? 
• What people, equipment, space, supplies, or services do you need to keep that revenue flowing if you experience a business disruption? 

Consider investing in system migration software to enable you to migrate your systems to a location away from the disaster so that you can continue business as usual. One product I would highly recommend is CloneManager™ which has been developed using its own transport mechanism and web services to provide optimal and fast transfers of data from source to target machines. An added advantage is that it allows system migration to and from different physical, virtual or Cloud environments. Even if you have a network with a restricted bandwidth, clones can be performed quickly and reliably with this software.

6. Invest in BMR software

Data loss can have a huge impact on your business and data backup is a key aspect of business continuity and a disaster recovery plan. Bare Machine Recovery (BMR) provides a complete backup solution, assisting in the rapid recovery of servers to a pre-disaster state. Cristie Software’s BMR solutions can recover data in less than 10 minutes and enables you to schedule regular, full and incremental backups which can then rapidly recover your systems to an identical server state, even to dissimilar hardware. Make sure your business has a reliable backup plan with Cristie BMR solutions. To find out more click here.

7. Test, Test and Test again!

All of the effort you put into backing up your data can be for nothing if you are not capturing the information properly. 

So you can have the best backup system and a top-notch disaster recovery plan, but if you do not run a regular drill to make sure it all works, it may not work when you need it to! Then you will be no better off than the survivors combing through wreckage and thumbing through the yellow pages for the contact number of the nearest data-recovery specialist. 

Therefore, invest in the Recovery Simulator software add-on that is currently available on the market, to ensure that your BMR solution works. Run these tests regularly so that you can be confident your systems are secure from any disaster or crisis evolving.

So there you have it: the seven steps you need to take for business continuity and system security to keep you armed and ready for any future crisis attacks!

For more information regarding data backup, recovery and system migration speak to one of the experts:

Free phone: +44 1453 847000 

Follow us on Twitter: @CristieSoftware

Email: sales@cristie.com

60% of companies that suffer a major data loss go out of business within 6 months.

INCORRECT. This statistic is a classic urban myth. In fact 100% of businesses that lose 100% of their data do not go out of business. The reality is that most businesses which lose data stay in business. There is a hierarchy of reasons why people can't recover and this starts with not having backed up in the first place.

Nonetheless, the main problem for businesses has always been obtaining a reasonable R.T.O. (recovery time objective) that allows for business continuity after a crisis.

On that note, let me throw you back to October 2012 to the North Eastern coasts of the United States. Hurricane Sandy had hit and the storm had become the largest Atlantic hurricane on record with winds spanning 1,100 miles. Twenty four states were affected, with particular severe damage in New York. You will most likely remember the worldwide news coverage showing its storm surge flooding streets, tunnels and subway lines, cutting power in and around the city. Damage in the United States amounted to $65 billion.

Well, within NYC stood Einstein Healthcare. They had already invested in BMR ahead of the storm. By selecting Cristie Software’s TBMR software product in advance, they were able to backup all their data and recover it to a command centre, which was set up away from the storm line and connected to the NYC office. 

As a result, twenty patients were seamlessly transferred from NY Downtown Hospital, and as the storm and its effects worsened, additional patients were taken in from NYU Langone, Bellevue Hospital and nursing homes across the region. 

Midst the crisis, business continued.

What made the process so fast and smooth was the fact that Cristie Software’s TBMR product offered the company tailored integration with their IBM TSM systems, as well as automating the recovery process directly from the respected servers’ backups so that there was no additional management scheduling or storage required. 

In a nut shell, Cristie's BMR software bridges the all-important gap between commercially unrealistic server clustering, and time consuming manual recovery, providing reliable automated recoveries in less than 10 minutes.

So there you have the answer to business continuity: invest in BMR. Particularly: CristieSoftware’s BMR.

The 5 Most Expensive Natural Disasters in the World!

1.      Earthquake and tsunami, Japan cost $235 billion in March 2011.

2.      Kobe earthquake, Japan cost $100 billion in January 1995.

3.      Hurricane Katrina, U.S. cost £81 billion in August 2005.

4.      Northridge earthquake, California, U.S. cost $42 billion in January 1994.

5.      Hurricane Sandy, U.S. cost between $20-50 billion dollars after it struck in October 2012.

Q: Does your business have a disaster recovery plan in place?
A: Speak to Cristie Software: Predictable Recoveries in an Unpredictable World.