One of the interesting side effects of recent weather conditions has been an unplanned test of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans by multiple organizations. One of the things many people noticed was the fact that even cloud providers were not immune from this. Even very large cloud providers went dark as their regional DCs were disabled by storms and excessive heat.
This provoked a number of people to consider the question “How long can I go without my online services?” In many cases, the answer was “Not at all”.
For those who did not get the unplanned test, this may be a very good time to take a look at your business continuity plans and see if they hold up. If you haven’t looked at your plan in a while, you may find that you are doing things very differently now and that you need to update.
A few questions for those who have not reviewed your Continuity and Recovery plans recently:
- Do you have a BC/DR plan?
- When was it last updated?
- What are the most critical apps that must stay up?
- Are your critical apps distributed so that failure in one region won’t bring down everything?
- Can your employees access critical information securely if everything is running from a back-up site?
Some ideas on getting started with BCDR planning:
http://www.juniper.net/us/en/solutions/enterprise/business-continuity/
Some ideas on planning if you use a cloud BCDR provider:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/071012-amazon-outage-260788.html?hpg1=bn
Quick tips on designing for BCDR
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/07/02/cloud-computing-forecast-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-...
Advice on picking a disaster recovery site:
http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Picking-A-Disaster-Recovery-Site/ba-p/1336
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