>> That leads into talking about
disaster recovery and business continuity.
In the event that a disaster strikes,
redundancy is going to be key to getting back online,
backup and running and
enabling the continuity of the business.
You hear the terms BCP for
business continuity planning and
DRP for disaster recovery planning.
We often hear them together
or sometimes used interchangeably.
We want to make sure that we
know the difference between them.
A business continuity plan is
an overarching umbrella document that
includes many other plans that helps sustain
the organization in case of a disaster.
The DRP is more of a short-term document
that is focused on the immediacy of the disaster.
I've heard people saying the DRP is the sky's falling,
the BCP is the sky has fallen. How do we keep going?
Disaster recovery is really focused on restoring
IT services to operation based
on their criticality as quickly as possible.
When we talk about criticality,
we mean time sensitivity.
There are certain services that
while we are offline we lose money.
If we have an eco commerce site, for instance,
the longer the eco commerce site is unavailable,
the less money I'm generating.
That would be a very critical service.
There are seven stages or phases of
business continuity plan and lots of
different organizations have
their own documents they use.
This is NIST 800-34.
ISO 27031 has a framework of business continuity.
There are various plans available
and they're all performing the same functions.
We start out with project initiation.
Writing a business continuity plan is
a project and it should be managed as such.
We start with the project then we
move into the business impact analysis.
This is probably the most
critical step because it is where we
identify what elements are
critical and how critical they are.
That's going to be the driver for what we recover in
what we recover and how quickly we do so.
We identify our recovery strategies
then get our design and development.
We look to implement the plan,
we test it and maintain it.
Those are the seven phases.
Again, this goes back to NIST 800-34.
There are other frameworks out there in
the support business continuity planning.
If we look at the project initiation,
you're going to manage this as a project.
We have to have support and
buy-in from senior management.
A business continuity plan isn't something that you
write one afternoon over margarita at Chili's.
This is a lengthy process that needs funding and support.
Senior management is going to put their buy-in
in writing and they're going to sign off.
That's committing to support and
funding and the project manager should be named.
That's going to be the person who coordinates
the business continuity planning processes.
We figure out the scope of the plan.
We select members of the BCP team.
The business continuity planning team
should come from a diverse background.
You should have representation from throughout
the organization, including senior management.
On our next phase, this is the big one
because this is the business impact analysis.
This is where we do our research and identify and
prioritize all of our business
processes based on the criticality.
Again, criticality is time sensitivity.
This document is going to give us
metrics to determine how
quickly these critical devices need to be up online.
We'll talk about things like Recovery point objectives
, service level objectives.
We've already talked about MTBF and MTTR.
Let me just take a minute and talk
about service level objectives,
SLOs, not to be confused with SLAs.
Service level objectives,
the idea is that if we're in some disaster operations,
we're not going to be providing
100 percent of our normal service to our customers.
What we might say is in the event
that these services are unavailable,
we at least like to operate at 80 percent.
That's a service level objective.
It takes into consideration that
you can't operate at 100 percent.
What are we looking for,
striving for, in a reduced capacity?
A recovery point objective is tolerance for data loss.
How current must data be?
If I say I have an RPO one hour,
you need to restore all files up until an hour ago.
How much data am I willing to lose?
Recovery time objective,
RTO and MTD are sometimes used interchangeably.
Recovery time objective, Maximum Tolerable Downtime.
This is what's the maximum amount
of time we can be without
the service before we suffer loss that's unacceptable.
What's our maximum time?
We've already talked about mean time between failures,
the amount of time that the device will run,
we repair it, then it fails,
then we repair, then it fails.
MTTR is again, that
mean times to repair, just what it sounds like.
Also, we need to determine
minimum operating requirements because when
we restore these devices, for instance,
if I have software that has to
be up and running within nine minutes,
you better make sure I have the hardware
that will run that software, so to speak.
Any sort of environmental or application type requirement
should also be in the BIA.
The next phase, identify my recovery strategies
in the event of a disaster
assuredly their has been some loss.
Let me just say that it should go
without saying that if we always
place the physical safety of
our employees above anything else,
if there were ever to be
a decision process to make
where human life may be at risk,
we have to choose something different always.
After human life, we start to think about our facility
because that would be an area that
would cost us a great loss.
If our facility is damaged or
is unavailable for a period of time,
we may need somewhere to work.
Maybe our employees can work from home, but maybe not.
If not, we generally lease an off-site facility.
We might lease a cold site.
A cold site is really
just a bare-bones facility that
has heating and air conditioning.
There's nothing beyond that. It's just an empty building
or an empty space.
Obviously, coming into a cold site is
going to take a while to get back up and running.
Cold sites are the cheapest thing.
With a warm site, they're the basics,
but there's also furniture.
There are computer systems, there are telephones.
Again, that's just generic equipment, nothing on my own.
That will still take a bit of
time to get back up and rolling.
Speaking of rolling,
there's a rolling hot site.
Sometimes you see these.
They pull up in the event of a disaster like
a little mobile home on
wheels containing computer equipment,
perhaps, but something that we can
process some other data center operations.
It's really a short-term solution.
We can pay for a hot site.
That's a location that is under our ownership,
not ownership, but we have exclusive use to.
It's fully configured and has my equipment and
we just really need to come in and
restore from the latest backup.
You can get back up and running pretty quickly.
Mirrored site is usually on our ownership.
It's a branch office.
We can switch operations to the northwest region.
You've got access to our data. They're staffed.
They've all of the equipment that they need.
In order to make sure that it's
fully redundant in every way,
that could be very expensive.
There are certainly some recovery strategies
in relation to our facilities.
We also have to think about
>> personnel where job rotation
>> and training would help in any
>> of our processes as well.