Disaster Recovery Journal

Strategic BCP

Discover a better way to address key business continuity standards and guidelines that are so important for compliance and better continuity plans. Harness the power of the original BCP Genome™ to strengthen your own planning and compliance practices—whether you adopt its framework as is, or adapt its logic to create your own framework. Also, compare eight leading industry standards—ISO22301, FFIEC, NFPA, NIST, HIPAA, and more—to identify their strengths and gaps relative to program organization, management, training, and audit vs. emergency facilities or business and IT recovery.

Sponsored by Atlantic.net

Mellanox InfiniBand dramatically reduces hardware acquisition costs and improves the delivery of cloud services, permitting higher application scalability and performance.

Sponsored by EVault

Hurricane Sandy caused an unprecedented level of damage and disruption. Faced with extended power outages, fuel shortages, flooding, and transportation limitations, some companies managed to keep their businesses running while others suffered significant downtime. Why such a drastic difference among companies hit hard by the same storm in the same region?

Organizations with well-architected, thoroughly tested, and fully documented disaster recovery (DR) plans and solutions were able to bounce back quickly when Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc onshore. Those who were less prepared had their operations knocked completely offline. Are you ready for a disastrous event like Sandy?

Learn the top five advantages of cloud-connected(tm) disaster recovery.

Sponsored by Recovery Point

Now that Hurricane Sandy is only a memory for most businesses on the East Coast, we thought this would be a good time to share with you a few key lessons we learned from the storm that could help to improve your disaster recovery/business continuity planning.

Sponsored by Unitrends

This paper guides IT executives and system administrators in designing and implementing business backup and disaster recovery systems that enable every organization to rapidly recover entire business systems including business data, server OS, applications, and user data in case of a system failure or disaster, without experiencing undue planning and management pains.

Sponsored by Unitrends

Get past the hype and focus on simply, reliably, and cost-effectively protecting your systems and data. There are always a few "secrets" in any industry - and the backup and restore business has its share. Our secrets are widely known within the industry but are less well-known outside of it - for the obvious reason that none of these secrets helps the majority of the vendors in this space. Read this whitepaper to learn the secrets most vendors don't want you to know.

Sponsored by Windstream

Malicious software or "malware" is the biggest network security threat facing organizations today. Cybercriminals target enterprises that hold a great deal of money or conduct a high volume of transactions on a daily basis. A network intrusion can cost an organization as much as $5 million. And, the damage to a company's reputation can be irreparable. Statistics show that if a major security breach occurs against a U.S. enterprise, that organization has a 90 percent chance of going out of business within two years. This is particularly alarming considering that malware is currently the fastestgrowing trend in the misuse of network resources.

Sponsored by Stategic BCP

For many business continuity professionals, BCM is changing toward a convergence with risk management. Learn how to appreciate the difference, as well as the need for evolving toward new tools and objective methodologies that can help you keep pace with risk assessment and management. Gain ideas for building reliable plans based on thorough, objective BIAs and methodologies. And leverage the opportunity to make business continuity a more strategic part of your organization's operations.

Sponsored by eVault

When establishing a backup and recovery program, most IT experts focus first on technology What team do you need to have in place? What communications and cross-functional planning need to occur? What are the program deliverables, milestones, and proof points?

Learn about expert techniques used to run a successful backup and recovery program: assigning ownership, managing expectations, preparing for audits, and building redundancy into the team.

Sponsored by eVault

Cloud-connected™ data protection keeps a copy of your data onsite so that you can back up and recover data over your LAN. It also puts a copy of the data in the cloud—your private cloud or a public cloud—for offsite disaster protection. The goal is to combine the best of onsite and cloud data protection to get the right balance of reliability, performance, and affordability.

Find out how cloud-connected™ backup and recovery offerings are helping customers thrive in today’s rapidly evolving data protection environment.

Sponsored by eVault

It’s a trend that is storming the business world—workers using their own smartphones and tablets to access corporate data wherever they go. How can you make sure your confidential business data stay secure and accessible? It starts with a sound bring-your-own device (BYOD) policy.

Sponsored by Unitrends

Learn how to get beyond the insurance metaphor to create a value proposition for data protection. In this document we're first going to explore the use of the insurance metaphor in terms of its most fundamental element: the broad consequences of data loss. We'll also discuss industry and regulatory consequences of data loss. After that we'll go beyond the insurance metaphor and present three additional mechanisms for selling data protection to the CFO.

Sponsored by Unitrends

Unitrends allows you to escape the limitations of restrictive backup for Windows Server 2012. Learn why Unitrends is the #1 all-in-one complete backup and data protection solution for Microsoft virtual, physical and cloud environments.

Sponsored by Windstream

Since Windstream's role is central to customer network security, we as an ISP and Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) must be “ahead of the curve" to maintain our position within the confines of the popular compliance standards because the overwhelming buying triggers for our services surround these standards. We see emerging threats and general business practices that require review and standards application on a regular basis.

Sponsored by SunGard

When it comes to building a business continuity management (BCM) program that's complete, current, and compliant, there is no substitute for BCM software. But the benefits of a good BCM program extend beyond just using an automated tool. Learn why leveraging the right BCM software and services provider also makes real business sense, before, during and after business interruption

Sponsored by SunGard

Writing a plan is not enough. Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on demonstrating business resilience of mission critical business processes. But with the myriad of tests possible, how does an organization decide upon and justify what it will test? SunGard Availability Services offers guidance on how this can be addressed by applying key elements from risk management and business impact analysis – in essence, taking a risk-based approach.

Sponsored by SunGard

In May 2012, the International Standards Organization (ISO) published the long-awaited ISO 22301 which utilizes as a foundation BS 25999:2: a standard which has already garnered broad acceptance outside the UK. SunGard Availability Services outlines how this new standard "Societal Security – Business Continuity Management Systems –Requirements" offers a robust framework for individual organizations to build their own Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS).

Sponsored by Atlantic.Net

HIPPA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HITECH and SSAE16 are also Acts that require datacenters to live up to certain standards. It was designed to provide better access to health insurance, reduce the occurrence of fraud and abuse and lower the cost of obtaining health care in the USA. So, dedicated server and managed hosting services that use new generation datacenters must ensure that they can meet the requirements as outlined in the compliance requirements of the Acts.

Sponsored by Zerto

Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) 2.0 takes Zerto's award-winning, hypervisor-based replication technology to the next level, providing enterprises with a scalable, robust and automated solution for their data protection needs across different sites and application types. Zerto replication solutions lift disaster recovery from the storage layer to the virtualization layer, offering organizations critical benefits such as scalability across thousands of VMs, VM-level granularity, automated test and recovery, and low RTO/RPO. ZVR 2.0 builds upon the previous release to continue to deliver true, cost-effective BC/DR for virtualized mission-critical applications.

Sponsored by Zerto

Virtualization has changed the face of disaster recovery, but traditional replication and recovery solutions are not conditioned to deal with the demands created by the virtual paradigm. In light of these challenges, Zerto has compiled a list of ten questions enterprises should use to evaluate their current DR initiatives for mission-critical applications and ensure its suitability for the virtual world.

Sponsored by Zerto

Zerto Virtual Replication, the industry's first hypervisor-based replication solution, lifts disaster recovery from the storage layer to the virtualization layer, offering organizations critical benefits such as scalability across thousands of VMs, VM-level granularity, automated test and recovery, and low RTO/RPO. Leveraging the flexibility of the hypervisor, Zerto is able to deliver enterprise-class disaster recovery without the associated enterprise infrastructure changes and costs. This white paper compares and contrasts hypervisor-based replication to traditional replication solutions and evaluates how virtualization is changing the face of IT.

Sponsored by Zerto

Enterprises today are beginning to virtualize their mission-critical applications in order to increase availability, business continuity and disaster recovery. While cloud virtualization has become a viable option and enterprises are seeking private, hybrid and public cloud BC/DR solutions, these solutions are still limited by the fact that mission-critical applications up until this point have been effectively virtualized and managed in the cloud, but ineffectively protected. This white paper will explore the opportunities and challenges of private cloud BC/DR, disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) and in-cloud BC/DR to guide enterprises in their search for the best-suited cloud solution.

Sponsored by EVAULT

In the past, a comprehensive disaster recovery solution was out of reach for midmarket and smaller companies because of the significant up-front costs and expenses. Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions significantly reduce total cost of ownership by eliminating the large initial investment and moving these large capital expenditures to smaller recurring operating expenses. Plus, cloud-based disaster recovery is fast, reliable, and secure. The bottom line: World-class disaster recovery services are now affordable for midmarket and smaller companies. This white paper examines the evolution of disaster recovery, discusses relevant advances in technology, reviews the benefits of using the cloud, shows how cloud disaster recovery works, and offers a checklist for moving forward.

Sponsored by Strategic BCP

Elevate your BCM profile within your organization by taking a page from this playbook on customer satisfaction. Gain insight for leveraging basics of the BCM process into opportunities to raise your profile and value in the eyes of the key organizational "customers." Learn tactics that have already proven their validity at the highest levels in more than 250 organizations, and ideas you can apply in any organization.

Sponsored by Agility Recovery

Government mandated annual disaster testing isn't a big worry if you plan ahead. A time of crisis is not the time to be asking yourself critical questions such as, 'How long would it take to get our systems back up and running if they went down in a disaster?' Testing and preparedness are the keys to survival. Agility's whitepaper summarizes how to plan for the testing process by building a team and then challenging all aspects of your recovery operation. It also discusses the top 10 lessons learned from real disaster recovery processes.

Sponsored by Agility Recovery

Critical steps to keep your facility up and running during and after a disaster. Today's fast-growing highly mobile workforce is placing new demands on IT. As data growth increases, and that data increasingly finds its way onto laptops, the threats of data loss and security breaches have also increased. To guard corporate data on endpoints at all times, companies can follow a number of data protection and data security best practices. Incorporating these best practices can help you control sensitive information to mitigate the risk of regulatory and financial exposure and keep IT costs in check. Read more about how to define security policies for laptops, how to enforce endpoint controls and how to ensure employee adoption - all while keeping costs in check.

Sponsored by EVAULT

Today's fast-growing highly mobile workforce is placing new demands on IT. As data growth increases, and that data increasingly finds its way onto laptops, the threats of data loss and security breaches have also increased. To guard corporate data on endpoints at all times, companies can follow a number of data protection and data security best practices. Incorporating these best practices can help you control sensitive information to mitigate the risk of regulatory and financial exposure and keep IT costs in check. Read more about how to define security policies for laptops, how to enforce endpoint controls and how to ensure employee adoption - all while keeping costs in check.

Sponsored by EVAULT

This whitepaper covers the 12 Best Practices your company needs to know when choosing a data backup and recovery solution including security, reliability, compliance and more. Consider this your checklist when reviewing your current solution or when you are researching options.

Sponsored by EVAULT

With cost cutting so important for most organizations, data deduplication— and the allure of significantly reduced storage and bandwidth usage—has become the hot topic in data protection circles. But deduplication is just one component of performance optimization for data protection systems. This paper describes the benefits and potential risks of three optimization technologies commonly used for disk-based backup and recovery, enabling you to more confidently optimize your own data protection environment.

Sponsored by EVAULT

Businesses today face unrelenting data growth. IT staffs are struggling to ensure data availability under tight fiscal constraints. The unreliability and intensive management of traditional tape-based backup has forced backup administrators to create manual, error-prone processes in order to protect their data. Consequently, other critical objectives, such as supporting distributed environments and complying with regulatory requirements, are not being adequately met. Read this paper to see how using online backup can answer these challenges by leveraging cloud-based technology to securely protect your company against data loss.

Sponsored by EVAULT

There is a fundamental shift taking place in data protection. More and more companies are turning to cloud-based solutions to provide a more secure and even more simplified method of storing and access business-critical information. This whitepaper will cover:

• The essentials of guarding your company's digital assets: dealing with the explosive growth of data, outages, theft and human error, threat of disaster, regulatory compliance and litigation issues.

• The challenges of business continuity with multiple platforms and multiple sites

• The challenges and dangers of being in a tape environment

• How to set up a failsafe plan that gives your institution flexible protection in all scenarios

• And more

Sponsored by EVAULT

The incredible growth in the amount of electronic data generated for both business and personal use has resulted in higher costs for data storage and backup. Several factors have lead to these spiraling cost increases, including storage of larger files such as video and audio, multiple backups of the same files, and enforcement of industry compliance regulations. This paper will cover seven cost management techniques that will help your company optimize your storage and backup strategy.

Sponsored by EVAULT

The move to cloud-based services is being largely driven by the high cost of regulatory compliance. This is especially true for small and mid-size companies with information security budgets that are non-existent, small, or shrinking. But moving to the cloud can be daunting. So here's the good news: Recent protection controls and audit initiatives are giving cloud consumers the Trusted Data Assurance they need to adopt cloud-based services. Read our new EVault® ebook, by Felix A. Santos, EVault Director of Information Security and Compliance, to gain valuable information about cloud information security and data protection. You will learn:

• What is Trusted Data Assurance—and why it's so important to cloud consumers

• What your data privacy rights are and who owns your data

• Why regulations and standards are driving increased data security in the cloud

• How to prepare your data for the cloud

• How to evaluate data protection cloud providers

Sponsored by EVAULT

This eBook will cover what cloud storage can really do for your company including the business needs your current storage plan doesn't meet. It will also cover the business drivers for storage, data protection and disaster recovery, how to plan for cloud storage and fit cloud storage into your infrastructure and special considerations for a cloud-based backup and recovery plan.

Sponsored by Send Word Now

At Send Word Now, we take security very seriously, and we approach all aspects of our infrastructure and services with this in mind. Whether it concerns the location of our equipment, the method of firewall changes, or our process management, we manage every detail in order to properly safeguard our customers' data on a platform that is secure, reliable, and resilient. Our goal is to provide the most secure notification platform in the industry and offer our customers a system that they can trust.

Sponsored by MissionMode

Many organizations treat a crisis as a series of tactical issues affecting operational silos, rather than reviewing the needs of the crisis response at the organizational and strategic level. Organizations need a strategic view of crisis management that encompasses the whole enterprise. This white paper examines how to create that strategic view while reducing threats and deriving value from the distributed nature of the organization.

Sponsored by MissionMode

Large, complex plans often prove ineffective during a crisis. In this free white paper, a prominent crisis management expert describes a new way to streamline crisis management and focus on the key aspects of the response. By using operational and communication plans, coupled with a crisis support system, an organization can react and recover more quickly.

Sponsored by Riverbed

The explosion of 24x7 connectivity, combined with the growing demand for wherever-whenever data availability, has exposed serious shortcomings in how data is protected and managed. This paper examines various disaster recovery (DR) planning strategies, and details different approaches as well as the benefits of deploying Riverbed® Whitewater® cloud storage gateways to provide fast recovery should the unexpected occur. Download the white paper to learn more.

Sponsored by Sungard

Most organizations lack three fundamental components essential to managing recovery from a disaster: continually updated recovery processes, staff availability for test and recovery, and on-staff recovery expertise. Finding the right service provider with the experience necessary to deliver effective recovery management cover that gap effectively and efficiently.

Sponsored by Sungard

Managing recovery effectively is complex. A fully managed recovery solution removes the burden of that complexity from an IT organization. And when the recovery solution leverages modernized data movement technologies and a range of secure cloud and virtual infrastructures, the advantages are significant: higher availability, better performance, and lower cost.

Sponsored by Novell

As a busy data center manager, you might be struggling to keep up with the challenge of continually doing more with fewer resources. IT has become an integral part of business operation; in fact, most, if not all of the infrastructure you support is critical for keeping your company up and running. However, despite being asked to do more with less, you probably haven't gotten any more budget or team members, so you may have been forced to put some projects on the back burner. Chances are disaster recovery is one of those projects you'd like to bring to the front of the priority queue, and for good reason. It's nearly impossible to turn on the news without being bombarded by all the potential risk out in the world. Whether it is turbulent weather, natural disasters or man-made accidents, something bad seems to always be happening. When is the last time you took a look at your disaster recovery planning? What do you expect would happen if the ceiling collapsed in your data center?

Sponsored by Recovery Point

"Cloud computing" is today's hottest topic in IT. Cloud backup has already become a thriving category; now larger-scale cloud recovery is emerging as the next logical extension of that service. But what do these terms mean? Do customers' assumptions about the cloud in general, and backup and recovery in particular, match the services that providers are actually offering? More importantly, can cloud backup and recovery improve the effectiveness and efficiency of disaster recovery efforts, simplify processes and reduce cost ?

Sponsored by Everbridge

Disaster Planning and Business Continuity are two of the fastest growing fields in both the commercial and government sectors. Analysis of past disasters has shown that communications are a major limiting factor in disaster response. This paper examines the many historical reasons communications might fail during emergencies, and then directly applies the dynamic technology of mass notification as a remedy to many of those failures.

Sponsored by Riverbed

Data protection is simple: take everything and copy it somewhere far enough away so that you'll have it when you need it — in an emergency. The challenge is how to do this in the most efficient and reliable way. Deploying WAN optimization solutions from Riverbed can help you protect more, recover faster, reduce risk and save money. Get the facts about how Riverbed optimizes disaster recovery across the widest range of backup mechanisms, with no changes to your software or storage now.

Sponsored by Novell

The global recession, increased competition requiring just-in-time processes, squeezed information technology (IT) budgets, explosive data growth, and new regulatory requirements have all increased the importance of disaster recovery (DR). As a result, organizations are now under pressure to create, re-evaluate and update their disaster recovery plans. Looking across the DR industry today, there are hundreds of solutions whose value should be measured in three ways: cost, performance and risk.

Sponsored by Everbridge

This white paper outlines ten major questions to ask every vendor you evaluate to help cut through sales pitches and marketing noise so you can get to the fundamentals of each system and its fit within your organization.

Sponsored by Everbridge

A mass notification system is an integral component of an organization's emergency and routine communications capabilities. While these systems are most often associated with emergency notification for contacting employees during and after a disaster, mass notification dramatically improves an organization's operational efficiency and bottom line when implemented for day-to-day operations. Just a few common examples include alerting supply chain members about a needed change in delivery schedules; reminding employees about policy changes, deadlines, and other time-sensitive information; and mobilizing IT staff more quickly after a server goes down all make an organization and its employees more efficient and competitive.

Sponsored by Everbridge

Do you know what you will say in the critical first minutes after receiving reports of an active shooter on campus? How about six hours into the incident? What will you tell people when your county issues a flood watch or the power in your building goes out at 10:00 a.m. on a Monday?

Sponsored by Avalution

What's the "typical" background of someone responsible for a business continuity (BC) program? What's a "typical" BC program structure? What deliverables should I expect after a business continuity planning project? The answer to all three questions is simple – "it depends." Business continuity programs are unique to each organization, and the background of the business continuity professional is diverse. Due to the unique nature of business continuity programs and their assigned professionals, getting a business continuity program off the ground can be challenging. This "side" of the brochure will assist you, the newly named business continuity owner, in determining your future business continuity program's key characteristics, with the objective of designing and implementing an efficient and effective risk management strategy.

Sponsored by eBRP

Every organization must choose its own objectives, but if the goal of your organization's BCM program is assuring the ability to survive any disruption.

Sponsored by eBRP

If a BIA is a fundamental part of BCM, the underlying cost may simply be a necessary evil. But, when a BIA is a one-time 'project' – as in many organizations – is the cost realistically proportional to its value?

Sponsored by Riverbed

Wide area network (WAN)-based approaches to data backup are dramatically influenced by WAN bandwidth limitations and network latency. Without significant, costly WAN bandwidth upgrades this can make WAN-based backup impossible for large remote offices with significant data stores. Riverbed makes network-based backup feasible, in many cases through use of existing WAN links, without the need for bandwidth upgrades. Our intelligent, storage-specific optimizations yield higher data reduction ratios for the common enterprise workloads seen in SRDF/A environments at both the network and application level, enabling enterprises to realize up to a 30:1 compression while maintaining a high throughput. Download this paper and learn more about this strategy today.

Sponsored by Riverbed

Storing data in the cloud using a Whitewater™ cloud storage gateway from Riverbed Technology overcomes what is becoming a serious challenge for IT departments: how to manage the vast, and ever-growing, amount of data that must be protected. Whitewater eliminates concerns about data security, data transmission speeds over the Internet, and data availability, while providing great flexibility and a favorable return on investment. Moving data to the cloud replaces the high costs of tape and disk storage systems with a pay-as-you-go cloud storage tier. This paper makes the business case for cloud storage, outlining where capital and operational costs can be eliminated or avoided by using the cloud for backup and archive storage.

Sponsored by Send Word Now

MIDTOWN, New York City - When a steam pipe burst at East 41st and Lexington during the afternoon rush hour on July 18, 2007, a rust-colored geyser of near-boiling water erupted nearly 100 feet into the air, causing cars to flip and commuters to flee for their lives. The blast of steam and the resulting shower of debris continued for two hours, raising fears of asbestos contamination in the neighborhood, and forcing authorities to cut off access to the affected streets. One death and over 30 injuries were reported on the day of the accident, but the effects of the crisis continued even after the streets were cleared. It was estimated that the financial losses in the frozen zone surrounding Grand Central Station reached upwards of $30MM, and impacted over 100 businesses in the area. In the aftermath of unexpected incidents such as this one, a business can suffer tremendous losses very quickly, especially if it's not prepared. And, as we will see in this paper, even proper planning is not sufficient without the ability to implement and carry out a business continuity plan both quickly and easily.

Sponsored by Send Word Now

When you're choosing an emergency notification provider, it's important to select a platform that's easily accessible, no matter where you are or when a crisis occurs. In today's world, that means having mobile access at all times.