Tips for a Good Disaster Recovery Plan

By Scott Donnelly, Director of Sales and Marketing
Integrated Business Systems
Fairfield, New Jersey

Hot, warm or cool? While the topic of temperature in a corporate environment might once have referred to HVAC settings, today it involves a far more serious subject business continuity planning. Executives have become increasingly focused on this important component of their overall business plan. As a result, they are discovering an array of data storage and access options, including hot, warm and cool sites.

At its core, a business continuity plan ensures that in the event that a company's main office is damaged or destroyed, its information is retrievable. This essentially allows businesses to continue their operations at another location, if necessary. While the concept is simple, the creation of a business continuity plan can be complex.

To begin the planning process, companies must first determine how long they can wait to resume operations. They also need to look at what components of their business are missioncritical and which are not.

Most companies today perform regular data backups onto tapes and take the tapes off site. But what would happen in the event of a disaster? The media is intact, but the equipment on which the data runs has been destroyed. Unless an organization can afford to stop business entirely for days, weeks or perhaps even a month, its executives should consider investing in a customized business continuity plan.

The industry has developed varying definitions of hot, warm and cool sites. The hot site is the most sophisticated and expensive type of data replication routine. Data is replicated on two separate servers, one in the operational location and one housed at a different physical site. Transactions are updated on both systems simultaneously.

Literally, if a company is shut down, it can immediately operate from the hot site server. Many financial institutions and Wall Street firms employ this type of high-end solution, which requires the costly purchase of duplicate equipment and a significant amount of ongoing maintenance. For most small- to mid-sized companies; however, it is overkill and presents a financially impractical approach, given the transaction loads and real-time constraints.

A warm site provides many of the same benefits, but the data is not refreshed as often. The data-replication routine can occur anywhere from once every 24 hours to once a week. The data transfer often takes place through a high-speed connection. In the event of a disaster, the warm site would provide day-old data. While this presents some disadvantages, it provides significant savings in terms of data synchronization management and systems maintenance.

Cool sites provide a third alternative and one that makes sense for companies that do not have the funds to purchase duplicate machines, rent additional space and hire consultants to assist in the formation of routines. Cool sites are offsite facilities that operate on a service bureau model, offering shared hardware, infrastructure and consulting resources. Customers send data either on tape, via the Internet, or point-topoint communication lines. The cool site provides the replicate machines, operating systems and applications required for effective disaster recovery at a cost savings.

The cost involved in disaster recovery planning ranges significantly and is typically grossly underestimated. Ultimately, it depends on a company's overall systems applications and uses. By combining hot, warm and cool sites, smaller organizations can develop more economical plans. In the process, companies must ask themselves what components of their IT infrastructure are needed and which they can temporarily live without.

Above all, companies must properly test their business continuity plan, thoroughly train staff and ensure that all backup and restore procedures are well documented. Oftentimes, companies perform "fire drills," or simulated disasters, to make sure they can recover and run their businesses using off-site servers. Good business continuity service providers will test their clients' systems at regular intervals and produce documentation that enables customers to conduct fire drills independently.

The concept of housing mission-critical data at a remote location has always been an important, yet overlooked, part of a sound business strategy. But now, more firms are realizing that creating a comprehensive plan now can help them avoid potentially devastating losses, while enjoying a new sense of data security and peace-of-mind. — RENY

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Scott Donnelly is the director of sales and marketing in the Fairfield, NJ office of Integrated Business Systems. He can be contacted at scott@ibsre.com.

Reprinted with permission from the May 2004 edition of Real Estate New York