How can businesses be disaster prepared

BANGALORE, INDIA: In light of the recent Hurricane Sandy, most areas that have been affected have gone into blackout mode and many organizations have closed operations for the moment advising their employees to work from home etc.

However, this brings into question the aspect of being disaster prepared which one may not be able to foresee. Natural disasters such as the Hurricane Sandy pose a threat to business continuity as well as results in loss of business for all, notwithstanding the lives which have been affected and lost as well in this unfortunate tragedy.

Venkatesh Swaminathan, country head, The Attachmate Group India, shares his thoughts on being disaster prepared and how to prioritize recovery of assets/applications etc.

1. Prioritize for business continuity

One must need to prioritize in terms of what one would need; want and what may not be needed for business continuity during a disaster. This is where one must look at the aspect of High Availability or real time availability for certain mission critical applications etc. as compared to what may be allowed for a down time.

2. Assess potential risks and Plan

One must assess potential risks with respect to what business assets may be allowed to be lost as opposed to what has to be saved at any cost as this assessment will enable prudential judgement to recover mission critical operations.

Companies can prevent themselves from disasters by planning in advance and therefore setting up a contingency plan in place that will cover all aspects ranging from prevention to recovery.

While continuous replication has always been a followed practice, not all functions or applications are replicated on priority.

Disaster Recovery planning should encompass a mix of off-site storage as well as on-site backup processing. Any business entity should prepare a disaster recovery plan in advance (preferably written) to address critical functions and / or operations. The basic premise is to ensure continuous availability of resources and operations in the event of any calamity and eventually lead to restoring stability and recovery.

It should also establish protection tiers. Business-critical workloads (for example, email or CRM) will require RPO (Recovery Point Objective, or the amount of data

lost between the disaster event and the most recent restore point) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective, or the length of downtime permitted to restore the server) of a few minutes to perhaps an hour.

Print servers typically have RPO and RTO of several hours or days, since print jobs can be easily re-routed to other printers. Most organizations have several protection tiers to quantify their disaster recovery needs.

3. Act

On the event of any disaster, as it strikes, one should follow the basic Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that have been documented and circulated as a mandate within the organization. This also should encompass that IT should ensure proper user rights to respective user groups for access and seamless business continuity as at the time of disaster.