Recovery time

Interview with Ian Masters, DoubleTake Software

FST. What options are available for financial institutions seeking to protect their data and systems?

Ian Masters. The options for data and system protection range from traditional tape backup through to synchronous replication, and the price tag associated with the available solutions varies greatly. The recovery point and time objectives will also vary with each of the chosen solutions and not all of them will provide both data and system protection. So in order to ensure disaster preparedness; you need to follow these three basic steps:

1. Identify and understand your business-critical systems. Understanding and assessing your environment is the first step toward planning for a disaster. You will need to begin by identifying critical servers, business continuity objectives, and mandated requirements.

2. Plan for the rapid recovery of business operations following an unplanned outage. Look for a solution that compliments your tape backup strategy by providing immediate failover capabilities.  The overall goal is to minimise business disruptions and maintain a high level of confidence in the ability of your firm to resume working in a timely manner.  A risk assessment process can help prioritise the most important applications.  Create a detailed plan to address the following (but not limited to):
•    Books and records back-up and recovery
•    Financial and operational assessments
•    Alternate communications with customers and employees
•    Business constituent, bank and counter-party impact
•    Regulatory reporting
•    Communications with regulators

3. Maintain a high level of confidence through ongoing use and testing. This will ensure critical internal and external continuity plans are effective and compatible. Practice, practice, practice. The top mistake most companies make is creating a plan but not revisiting the crucial steps to make that plan work.

FST. At such a difficult time for the industry, companies may put off investment in protecting their data. Can you outline some of the main challenges that are associated with the implementation of disaster recovery and how these differ for large and small organisations?
IM. There has never been a good time to put off implementing a business continuity or disaster recovery plan. However in these difficult times it could be even more important to implement a solution and ensure that your business can continue in the face of a disaster.  With operating profits reduced and competition high you need to ensure that you can continue as ‘normal’ throughout a disaster, the cost of downtime could be more crippling than ever before and you must be able to service your customers. 

The reason many businesses are putting off implementing a solution is the initial capital outlay.  There are two ways to look at this, firstly you could consider opting for a managed service that will meet your requirement and be charged at a monthly rate. My advice would be to look for a contract that does not tie you in for too long so that once the economic climate is better you reconsider your options.

FST. Data is the backbone for all financial institutions and disaster recovery plans are a must for IT departments, how can a successful business continuity plan demonstrate real ROI for organizations and offer competitive advantage?
IM. You can actually look at your business continuity or disaster recovery solution differently and assess its potential for return on investment. In the past, a business continuity infrastructure has been looked at as an insurance policy that should be there in case of a disaster. What about if you could make your business continuity infrastructure dynamic – using it everyday of the week to move information technology systems anytime, anywhere, for whatever purpose?

Dynamic infrastructure ties in all of the benefits of business continuity, without restoration times, without downtime and without IT managers giving up their weekends. We have to remember that most of the time IT managers are faced with the more common disaster scenarios like deleted files or emails, aging hardware, intermittent networks, failing power, hardware or just the challenge of provisioning a co-location facility for implementing a BCP.  These are often considered the little ‘d’ disasters and can be costly in terms of downtime and manpower, so if you have business continuity solution that can alleviate these costs it would pay for itself. 

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