Sometimes every once in a while really bad incidents take place.
And when I say bad I mean really bad.
Like we're talking hurricanes or acts of war or some type of really bad thing that's going to take place
that is going to massively disrupt your infrastructure.
And that's what contingency planning is all about.
So you really have two things to think about here when you're talking about this.
First of all you're talking about what we call disaster recovery.
We have a hurricane.
I live in Houston Texas we think about this stuff a lot.
We have a hurricane coming in.
We have a disaster it's going to put six feet of water in our offices.
How do we recover from that type of a disaster.
But on the same token I have an obligation to the people I pay rent to.
To make money.
So what do I do to keep my business continuity going.
What do I do to keep everything going.
So these two do work very much together and it's important that we can talk about him at the same time
under we'll just use the term contingency planning.
So the big thing we're going to talk about first is the idea of a disaster coming in let's say a hurricane
does the knock on wood come into the Houston Texas area.
I'm going to have to evacuate my offices.
So what we talk about is the concept of a backup site.
Now there are different levels of backup site.
We call them cold warm and hot.
Let me show you all three of those.
The first type of backup or recovery site is a cold site.
The way to remember a cold side is that it takes weeks to bring it up on line.
So this is going to be a basic office space.
There'll be buildings with air conditioning and chairs and desks but there won't be any operational
equipment.
There may be some equipment on site but it's basically not plugged in.
The big benefit of a cold side is that it's the cheapest of all the different types of recovery sites.
Second is a warm site a warm site will take days to actually bring online.
In this case it's a cold site but it does have operational equipments so all the computers are there.
They probably have their basic software running but they have either very little of your functional
data or no data whatsoever.
The last one is a hot site a hot site can take just hours to bring online many hot sites will have real
time synchronization literally everything happening on our main site is being mirrored over at our Hot
Site.
So almost all the data is ready to go and usually just a quick update.
Get the people over there and we're up and running.
The downside to hot sites is that they are very very expensive.
Simply picking a back up or recovery site just by going by the cold warm hot concept is good but there's
a lot of other things to consider when you're thinking about sites like this for example distance distance
is a really big deal in Texas.
These hurricanes can be really really wide.
So we want to make sure that whatever backup site we're using isn't going to be affected by the same
event.
Luckily for us in Houston we've got Dallas Texas and that's where we go whenever the hurricanes come
along.
Secondly when you're thinking about the location you need to think about some really important stuff
for example.
Pretty much everybody got power and they pretty much everybody has Internet.
But do they have the level of internet connectivity you need.
What internet tear are they connected to or are you way down on some little terrible ISP or are you
in a big pile.
What are your requirements.
You need to think about that.
Other things come into play.
For example if you're going to be there for a while.
What about housing.
What about entertainment for employees.
You need to think about all of these things when you're putting all this together.
Third are going to be legal issues.
For example one big issue we have is different types of data are handled different ways depending on
what country they're in.
So we need to make sure that wherever we are moving to expensive it's a different country that our legal
issues are handled in terms of whatever we need to do with that data.
This can be even more challenging when you get into the cloud itself.
Many countries require depending on your industry what you're doing that the data that you use on a
given daily basis must be within the same country that you're doing business and you really do have
to work very very closely with cloud providers to make sure that that's taking place.
So disasters happen you've got backup sites and everything's there.
You've thought about it and you've established a site.
You've made a decision on what type of site you want.
Keep in mind that business continuity and data recovery go hand-in-hand.
So the hurricane has gone away and the power's back up and we've mopped the floors and we're ready to
come back home.
Now what we have to deal with something that we call the order of restoration.
So what I'm going to do is just give you a sample order of restoration and this is the one we actually
use here in total seminars.
The first thing I'm going to check when we walk in the door is power.
I want to make sure the power is restored.
Now just because the power company says things are restored I want to make sure my outlets are functional
and I'm going to be running around with a tester to make sure I've got good AC power where I need it.
Second I'm going to make sure my wired LAN is up and running and any switches that are interconnecting
all my cable runs is up and good and everybody's happy.
Number three my internet service provider link here total seminars.
We can't get a lot of work done unless we're on the Internet.
So the third thing I'm going to do is make sure that the link is good and the routers are up and running.
And make sure we're in good shape there next any active directory or DNS or D.H. C.P. servers.
So I've got a couple of window boxes that tend to handle all that.
I make sure those are up in cooking next after that.
Are our accounts servers this way if people are calling in to buy things or to have questions or to
place orders.
We have the servers ready to deal with that stuff.
So along with that all my sales folks and account folks are going to have to have their workstations
up and running.
Now once we get the day to day stuff go and then I'm going to go looking back towards production for
example you like my videos Well we need to make sure our video production servers that store all these
videos are up and running and on top of that all my post-production guys need their video post-production
workstations up and running.
Now that's the core stuff.
But from there little things that aren't quite so critical to us for example I'm going to get my wireless
access points up and running at this point for the occasional times when people go wireless as they
come into my office.
And then last on my personal list are what I call peripherals.
So things like printers cameras scanners faxes making sure that these are all up and running contingency
planning without a little practice is just going to get you in trouble.
Don't let your first disaster be the first time you actually put all this in order.
So the big thing that we do more than anything else is we have annual exercises now.
These exercises can manifest in a lot of different ways.
You can do just a little tabletop exercise where your primary people are sitting around a table talking
about how this goes but they go through the order and understand it or you can do more aggressively
than that and actually do a fire drill where people go out and move servers and fire systems up and
get in cars and go places.
Expensive but if your systems are that critical it's not a bad investment.
You need to think about a lot of different things here.
For example the concept of fail over.
It's always nice to talk about these recovery sites but fail over simply means the process of making
that happen.
And that's where people get in trouble with this type of stuff.
They spend zillions of dollars setting up a warm site but they don't actually go to the fail over process
of making all of this happen.
I think it's very important personally to at least one time in every person's career to at least feel
that process.
All my employees have to deal with actually getting in their cars and going places and I like to say
I do it annually but probably not quite that often.
The other thing to think about is stuff like for example alternative processing sites.
Now when we talk about processing sites it's easy for me as a little company like total seminars to
just have this one warm site up in Dallas Texas where we do everything.
But with larger organizations you might have to have different types of processing sites for example
if you've got a big server farm you might be able to have your sales people back up and running.
But what are you going to be doing about whatever type of data that you're dealing with with your infrastructure.
So a lot of times we end up making cross agreements with sometimes even competitors and saying I've
got a farm you've got to farm if one of us gets in trouble we'll just go ahead and use each other's
space and you work out an agreement like that the other big issue that comes into play or alternative
business practices now little things for a company like me become very very important for example.
How do we take credit card information if we're using different types of accounting software.
How is that going to come into play if we are suddenly working in another state here in the United States.
Even sales tax issues come into play and we need to think about these alternative business practices
before it happens.
And the last big one and this one's really important we do this both was exercises and you certainly
do it if the real McCoy never happens.
And that is after action reports a clear and detailed documentation of everything that happened so that
if it ever happens again you'll be ready to handle any form of business contingency planning.