With the increasing trend of organisations thinking of or currently migrating critical production workloads to the cloud whether it’s a hybrid or public provider model it is still important to look at your data protection, there are the obvious advantages and benefits over the private cloud model and these have been documented numerous times and there is no need to go into detail about them again, but just to refresh a cloud should provide Infrastructure, Environmental, Human Resource and Software licensing savings; this in turn allows the business to focus strategically on core business services.

The advantages are clear but what other critical requirements are there? Does disaster recovery, business continuity, backup and archiving compliance ring a bell?

It is important when an organisation is in the process of choosing a cloud provider that along with providing robust IaaS SLAs that the provider can also provide data protection SLAs.

Has the provider had previous disaster recovery experience? Can it provide your organisation with a clear path during a disaster? Does the provider in fact provide backup, archiving and restore functionality at all? Who maintains the backup, archive and DR? Is the DR tested?

Cloud providers located at Tier 3 Datacentres provide numerous N+1 redundancy features but the fact remains there have been two Tier 1 vendor outages in the last 6 months that affected hundreds of customers.

So whether you organisation is looking or currently moving towards either a Public or Hybrid Cloud strategy ask the provider about data protection, your data is your business. 

Jarek Piotrowski  Senior Engineer

When it comes to disaster recovery — assuming they don’t ignore DR altogether — Australian businesses have a tendency to overestimate just how quickly they could retrieve their data if an incident occurs.

Often this is can be chalked up to an over-reliance on manual or non-automated systems, according to Kevin McIsaac, advisor at consultancy firm IBRS.

“The business has this unrealistic expectation that all their systems will be back in four hours,” McIsaac says. “They have no idea.”

A recent survey of Australian businesses indicated a heavy reliance on in-house manual or semi-automated disaster recovery approaches. A minority have gone the route of using in-house automated DR approaches or fully outsourced their disaster recovery processes. For about a year Bakers Delight has fallen into the latter category.

The bakery franchise, which has outlets in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, doesn’t have to deal with the same kind of business-critical data a bank does, says Joanne Stubbs, chief information officer at the franchise’s Melbourne HQ. But even for a seemingly low-tech industry such as baking, data is critical.

In the case of Bakers Delight, much of that data is sales related reporting from bakeries. “More and more we’re becoming dependent on our sales reporting being very timely,” Stubbs says.

“We have corporate dashboards that all the franchises have access to, and they can get access to updated sales information every 15 minutes.”

The reports are updated with data from all three countries the franchise has a presence in. So while data-loss might not be the same career-ender it would be in a bank, as with any business it’s still an important issue and DR is an important capability provided by the Bakers Delight IT department.

Prior to shifting to an automated DR solution, disaster recovery capabilities were the domain of in-house IT. About a year ago, however, Stubbs says she shifted to Global Storage’s DR-as-a-service.

Having IT maintain Bakers Delight DR capabilities involved a lot of overhead, Stubbs says, such as keeping software up to date and making sure software patches were applied, as well as training — “making sure that the technology was known among the staff for something that wasn’t used that frequently.”

Stubbs would much rather her staff be “employed doing things that challenge them rather than mundane routine stuff that they have to do as part of their daily duties or weekly duties.”

Bakers Delight has implemented Global Storage’s DR and backup system, dubbed Environment Ready. The system, which leverages FalconStor’s continuous data protection technology, uses an appliance situated in the Bakers Delight data centre. Data is continuously streamed to the appliance, and from there to Global Storage’s cloud.

The solution means that the business doesn’t need to find backup windows, and the staff to monitor the backup process. The appliance itself can provide a week or two of data, acting effectively as a local cache — so a single file or folder can be made visible quickly on the local network. Two or three months’ worth of data is stored offsite.

If a disk fails in the Bakers Delight data centre, a version can be mounted locally from the appliance. In the case of a fully fledged disaster, Global Storage staff can run a DR process based on the offsite data.

http://www.cio.com.au/article/457914/cutting_downtime_staff_overhead_outsourced_dr/

There was a time when businesses and their CIOs looked at backup and IT disaster recovery as one and the same.  Have we seen this thinking re-emerge?  During our discussions with clients from differing industries, some used to think that backup by itself formed the IT disaster recovery strategy of the company.  Fortunately many CIO’s have been able to educate businesses about the various scenarios and the implications of not having strategies in place such as, standby infrastructure at an offsite location or a tested disaster recovery solution.

With the evolution and acceptance of cloud computing and online data backup systems more businesses are able to adopt a mature backup and IT disaster recovery strategy as part of their over business Continuity Plan.  Supported by the investment of tier 1 software vendors, the industry has been able to confidently combine the functions of backup and IT disaster recovery through the introduction of extended retention.

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) has not only reduced RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) to almost zero but has also allowed CIOs and CFOs to realise increased savings through consolidation.  CDP technology can be used as part of a managed backup and disaster recovery solution with the added benefit of extended retention.  If configured optionally IT teams can have the high-availability luxury of local rollback snapshots points while having 7+ years of backup retention at the remote disaster recovery and backup site.

Offsite backup and disaster recovery treated as one, a consolidated approach to IT business continuity.

Gavin Hoffmann | Senior Account Director

Australian businesses are aware of the importance of disaster recovery planning, but their reliance on manual approaches means that organisations risk falling short of target recovery times if an incident occurs, according to research released today.

A US study conducted by IDG Research Services, a sister company of IDG Communications, the publisher of Techworld Australia, revealed that although most companies surveyed had DR plans in place, many relied on manual recovery processes that ran the risk of missing recovery targets. Two-thirds of participants relied on manual recovery.

In addition, testing of DR programs was a low priority, with a significant portion of organisations never conducting any ongoing DR testing at all.

The results of an Australian DR survey conducted among IT professionals, 58 per cent of whom worked for companies with more than 500 seats, by storage services vendor FalconStor mirrored the US results.

Seventy nine per cent of respondents said they had DR/business continuity plan in place but the majority relied on manual or semi-automated DR solutions and testing was done annually or not at all. However, 60 per cent indicated recovery periods of longer than four hours would impact on productivity, reputation or revenue.

Kevin McIsaac, advisor at consultancy firm IBRS, said that there was a false sense of security among Australian businesses when it came to DR. “The business has this unrealistic expectation that all their systems will be back in four hours,” he said. “They have no idea.”

Although most IT organisations realised the importance of DR planning, pressure from the business meant that revising and testing DR plans often falls by the wayside.

“I believe there’s of a lot of people in IT who are not sure about their IT plans or their ability to recover, but they don’t really kind of stick their head into it either — they don’t want to open Pandora’s Box,” McIsaac said.

“If I sat down with a reasonably senior person in your IT organisation and said, ‘Is this important?’ they would say yes. If I said, ‘Are you comfortable about your DR plans?’ they would generally squirm in their seat and go, ‘Mmm, not so much.’

“If I’m dealing with a more technical level guy, or a more junior guy, they just go ‘whatever’. For them, it’s just another piece of work. They’re overworked, they’re stressed, they’ve got way to many day-to-day operational problems and they’re putting out way too many day-to-day fires to really worry about what they consider to be an insurance plan for something they pray never happens. And if it does happen they’re no longer working there.”

McIsaac said there was an awareness of the problem, but “you think about the number of people who don’t insure their houses, think ah yeah we need to insure the house, then don’t do it”.

“It really falls in that same category,” he said. “Most IT organisations and people in general are often heavily driven by the urgent rather than the important, and it’s a classic planning and strategy problem.”

Educational seminar presented by Global Storage, FalconStor and SNIA ANZ

We are excited to announce Global Storage will be attending ‘The SNIA Roadshow’ in Melbourne for 2012. We would love to invite you to attend and hear our CEO David Duncan talk about the latest in Disaster Recovery and Backup for 2012/13.

Please come and join us and say “hi” to the Global Storage team.

This educational seminar is ideal for those designing a data protection solution, or those looking at business risks and how to minimise them.

The agenda:

• Th 07.45 am – Registration
• 08.00 am – Introduction and welcome from Vic Masi, Country Manager, FalconStor
• 08.05 – Trends in Data Protection – SNIA ANZ
• 08.25 – Automated BC/DR – Vic Masi, FalconStor
• 08.50 – David Duncan, CEO, Global Storage
• 09.15 – Networking
• 09.30 – Close

Breakfast will be served during the presentations.

Date and Location:

Thursday Nov 22nd – Park Hyatt Melbourne

If you have any queries please contact me on rachel.b@global-storage.com.au

We look forward to seeing you.

Kind regards,

Rachel

Rachel Brooker
Client Relations Manager