Dwindling budgets leave too little money to cover far too much work. It’s tempting to cut costs in places that aren’t used every day. But if that temptation leads to random cuts in disaster recovery (DR), you’re buying more trouble than you bargained for.
“While it is tough to justify shelling out the extra dough for a top-of-the-line processor, it is well worth it on the day that your processor fails,” says Jerry Melnick, CTO at Marathon Technologies Corporation, a provider of automated, fault-tolerant, high availability software for Windows applications.
“Many IT staff are working with constrained budgets and therefore have to buy lower priced equipment,” he says. “This equipment is more likely to see failures, increasing the likeliness of future problems.”
However, there are ways to cut costs in DR without jeopardizing the enterprise. You just need to know where to slice and where to steer clear.
Where Not to Skimp
Don’t guess where to cut: Know! “The best way to determine where financial resources should be dedicated is to conduct a business impact analysis,” says Simon Kissler, executive director and director of technology at Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications Services (IHETS), a consortium of Indiana’s public and private higher education institutions, state government agencies, public libraries, public broadcast stations, and K-12 schools collaborating to advance the education and public service activities of its members through shared technology and eLearning services. “This process will identify the most critical components of the overall system, their tolerance, or lack thereof, for downtime, and create a logical mapping of where dollars should be dedicated and where an organization may be able to skimp.”
Never skimp by using common components in the physical network hardware. Dual-ported network cards share common hardware logic, and a single card failure can disable both ports, advises Melnick in one example. “For full redundancy, you need either two separate adapters or a built-in network port combined with a separate network adapter,” he says.
Have a telephone disaster recovery plan. Customers need to reach you and the telephone is a common touchpoint, especially in emergency situations. Make sure phones are answered and messages are properly forwarded to your company during and immediately following a disaster. Don’t assume Internet telephony will save you, as it too is vulnerable to connectivity outages. Make sure you have a full telephony DR system in place.
Make regular and frequent data backups. Be sure that data is automatically backed up on a frequent and regular schedule. Otherwise, you may recover old and worthless data during an actual emergency.
“There are two methods for replicating data across sites,” explains Melnick. “One method is to tightly couple redundant servers across high speed/low latency links, to provide zero data-loss and zero downtime.” The other, he says, is to loosely couple redundant servers over medium speed/higher latency/greater distance lines. “This provides a disaster recovery capability where a remote server can be restarted with a copy of the application database missing only the last few updates. In the latter case, asynchronous data replication maintains a backup copy of the database.”
Where to Cut Costs
Use virtualization technologies. These are cheaper to use technologies that often maximize bandwidth, and make data accessible from any device anywhere. “Well planned virtualization as a disaster recovery strategy significantly reduces, or in some cases eliminates, the need for secondary hardware, creating a many to one relationship,” says IHETS’ systems security engineer, Brandon Beale. “Capital cost savings can be substantial.”
Guard against an under/over vendor purchase. Do your homework. Many vendors use the same terms but mean very different things. Make sure you know what you are buying and how it fits your actual needs. “For example, if you plan for a 24-hour recovery time objective (RTO), but your application and business needs require a four-hour RTO, then your plan – at any cost – will not be successful in meeting your requirements,” says Jim Grogan, senior director at SunGard Availability Services. “Alternatively, if you develop the capability to recover in two hours, but your business processes really only needed 24-48 hour recovery, then you have likely invested in premier services that were not needed.”
Plan personnel to prevent staff shortages and payroll overages. Identify a core group of key employees as “first responders.” Make sure you have enough people to schedule relief after reasonable work periods and to prevent as much overtime and human exhaustion as possible.
Additionally, plan for reserve employees as backup for key employees who may be hurt in the disaster or otherwise unavailable for duty. A common mistake is to identify key personnel initially but not to appoint a replacement if one or more of those individuals leave the company. The time of disaster is not the time to discover necessary staff is not in place or that sufficient training was never done. “Without the structure of an existing plan that has been validated in both practice and in meeting the business requirements, an ad hoc response can make matters worse rather than advancing any recovery effort,” says Grogan.
Ineffectiveness costs far more in the end than whatever you think you saved in the beginning.
“If a DR program is not effective, then any investment of time and resources become wasted investments,” says Grogan.
Related Information From Dell.com: Create a Network Roadmap.
