Disaster Recovery Journal

The word “downtime” is one that the customer of any hosting provider dreads to hear. It is used to explain the common occurrence in which a server or website hosted on that server is busy or unavailable as a result of scheduled maintenance or even a system failure. Any time a server is down, all the information you have stored on the server—whether it is an application, a website, or files—will also be down. 

This blog brings to an end my review of BCI predictions for 2013 – mainly because as we have now reached February, they are beginning to look more like news comment than forecasts.

Predictions 7 through 10 were about business failures, sustainability, increased outsourcing problems and social media respectively.

How does watching football on Sunday translate into to-do’s for Monday?  More than 100 million people watched the Super Bowl on Feb 3rd, they were expecting a great game and some good entertainment.  What they got was almost a disaster for CBS.  In the recovery planning business, we are always trying to minimize the likelihood of an incident becoming a disaster.  CBS did an excellent job of this on Sunday.

When the power went out in half of the Superdome and the game was stopped unexpectedly, CBS did a good job of keeping people entertained for the 34-minute delay.  While they likely didn’t plan for the lights going out in half of the building, they did have a contingency plan for the power going out and as a result were able to keep most fans watching the commercials and the announcers.  The numbers aren’t available yet, but they might have sold more commercials because of the extra prime-time viewership the “abnormality” created.

When it comes to cloud computing, expectations are high for 2013. Businesses of all sizes—from garage-based startups to multinational corporations—are putting their resources into utilizing cloud computing technologies and services to help them deliver products and services, while reducing overhead operating costs. 

Nearly 50% of all enterprises in North America and Europe are predicted to set aside budgets for cloud investments this year. Additionally, 50% of software development companies are planning to deploy applications in the cloud. According to a research report by 451 Market Monitor, the cloud computing marketplace will reach $16.7 billion in revenue this year, compared to a revenue of $8.7 billion in 2010. 

Today I will look at our predictions 5 and 6, which have some degree of overlap.

Firstly we predicted that “ISO 22301 will start to take off, with certificates issued in more than one country”. Hardly a difficult prediction I know, but still an opportunity to test the often argued premise that many companies had delayed certification to BS25999 because they were waiting for an ISO standard.

The term “cloud computing” refers to any activity or service that involves the “cloud.” No—not a literal cloud! This metaphorical cloud is a virtual system that is accessible online, where users can perform a wide variety of IT tasks. Cloud hosting is just one of the many utilizations of this technology. 

Cloud hosting allows a website to no longer be limited to a single server, as previously seen with dedicated and VPS hosting. A cloud-hosted website will have access to multiple cloud servers. One of the greatest benefits of cloud hosting is the virtually unlimited processing power, as users can always scale up if necessary. 

We are very happy to announce that the Disaster Recovery Journal is now available in a mobile version. Our mobile version is just like the hard-copy print edition that you read and enjoy.

Available for Android and Apple devices, Disaster Recovery Journal mobile gives you:

There has been some puzzled faces questioning our BC prediction number 4 – “Contingency Planning will become fashionable again as a part of a broader understanding of Business Continuity which includes Continuity Capability and Crisis Response”.

Without stealing the thunder of my colleague Lee Glendon who is researching this proposition and will issue a discussion paper on the topic later during BCAW 2013, I think it is becoming obvious that conventional BCM as defined by a management system does not cover the full range of BC thinking. British Standards are working on a Crisis Management Standard (BS11200) and an Organizational Resilience Standard (BS45000) so we can only assume that they agree with us.

By Stacy Gardner, Avalution Consulting
Article originally posted on Avalution Consulting’s Blog

Standards…ugh! Even though the business continuity profession appears to be paying some attention to the topics of standards development and organizational certification, you may be tempted to skip over these articles and ignore the opportunity to review new or revised standards when released (especially if you feel organizational certification isn’t right for your organization). However, many reasons exist as to why all organizations (and BC practitioners) should not only pay attention to standards, but also seek opportunities to incorporate applicable elements of them into their programs to improve performance and enhance credibility.

While it is impossible to avoid disasters that are out of your control, the affect of such disasters can be minimized with a disaster recovery plan.  Disaster recovery plans are essential for businesses that value resiliency and that understand the importance of spending money now to protect against the threat of a potential disaster in the future.  You never know when disaster may strike and it may happen at a very inconvenient time.

One way to ensure that your disaster recovery plan is comprehensive and flexible is to invest in colocation hosting.  While colocation hosting may seem like a more expensive alternative to running your own servers in- house, you are actually getting more value for your money if you look at it from a disaster recovery standpoint.  But, what are the benefits of colocation hosting for disaster recovery and why might you choose this solution for your business?