Rothstein Associates Inc. Business Survival ™ Weblog

There is a significant disconnect between information technology (IT) and business executives when it comes to disaster recovery preparedness, according to the results of a new State of Disaster Recovery survey. While both sets of executives share same views on the importance of information availability to the business, survey data reveal a split in how to achieve the goal of minimizing downtime when an unplanned IT outage occurs.

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Email has become the most pervasive form of business communication, impacting every aspect of every organization: communications between management, employees, prospects, customers, vendors, suppliers, partners, investors, and analysts.

MessageOne, a provider of email continuity solutions, commissioned a research report to understand the frequency, severity, and cause of email outages in North American corporations using Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.

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The year 2008 began with a dire prediction from Subodh Bapat, a vice president in the eco-computing team at Sun Microsystems, when he declared, “You’ll see a massive failure in a year.” He went on to say, “We are going to see a data center failure of that scale,” referring to the worm that took down 5% of worldwide UNIX boxes in 1988.

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Agility Recovery Solutions and Hughes Marketing Group have conducted a Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Survey of over 700 small and mid-size business owners, executives, managers and directors in the United States and Canada.

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Many of you may already be familiar with the general Darwin Awards, where “The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it…” In this fine tradition, Webtorials now has the “Darwin Awards for Disaster Recovery” by Gary Audin, Delphi.

“On the serious side, these stories highlight the need for planning for the non-technical as well as the technical side of a robust BC/DR plan. And even though we normally try to offer suggestions that will save you time and increase your efficiency, we take no responsibility if you spend too much time reading about the traditional Darwin Awards.”

See Darwin Awards for Disaster Recovery from Network World.

Business continuity can take many forms, from simply making sure key personnel are contactable at all times to having an separate facility built to relocate to in case of a disaster. Yet one aspect that is nearly always consistent is data backup and recovery: making sure vital information is saved in a safe place, and can be recovered when needed.

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SunGard Availability Services has released its annual analysis of major causes of business disruption. The analysis of SunGard’s invocations log has found that data corruption is now the fastest growing cause of business interruptions – after more than doubling in 2008. Despite a fall in the number of disaster declarations associated with hardware failure, this remains the single biggest cause, contributing to 39 percent of invocations.

See Data corruption is fastest growing threat to business continuity.

For the eighth consecutive year AT&T surveyed IT executives from U.S. businesses in the private sector with $25 million or more in revenue to get their views on disaster planning and business continuity trends.

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Managers with responsibilities for enterprise business continuity both in IT and overall bank operations should check to see how their staff reductions, budget cuts and cultural turmoil has impacted their ability to maintain or resume operations, meet their recovery times objectives (RTO) and service level agreements (SLAs) in case of even a minor disruption. Line of business and operations managers may be reluctant to admit that they have reduced capacity to perform a critical function, so some actual auditing and retesting may be required.

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Software buyers take note: you’re allowed to create and test back-ups of the software you buy. Well, so said the Full Federal Court of Australia when it was asked to consider whether or not testing a disaster recovery copy of a software program infringed copyright under Australian copyright law.

The court’s decision springs from a $3.2 million lawsuit brought by Software AG against Racing & Wagering WA.

SeeTesting Backups Does NOT Infringe Copyright by Anna Johnson.

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An unexercised contingency plan could be worse than no plan at all!

Be sure to read Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan, Philip Jan Rothstein, FBCI, Editor for valuable tips, techniques and insights.

Chloride, a European supplier of Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems and services, is strongly advising UK businesses to deploy resilient UPS systems in order to protect their mission critical equipment and processes.

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