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... show very precisely the level of preparation for disaster and the quality of recovery plan. There are few kinds of testing that can be performed by the organization: walk-through testing, checklist testing, simulation testing, parallel testing, and full interruption testing. For our case I think it will be wise to examine just few of them. Simulation Testing During this test, the organization simulates a disaster so normal operations will not be interrupted. A disaster scenario should take into consideration the purpose of the test, objectives, and type of test, timing, scheduling, duration, test participants, assignments, constraints, assumptions, and test steps.
Testing can include the notification procedures, temporary operating procedures, and backup and recovery operations. During a simulation, the following elements should be thoroughly tested: hardware, software, personnel, data and voice communications, procedures, supplies and forms, documentation, transportation, utilities (power, air conditioning, heating, ventilation), and alternative site processing. It may not be practical or economically feasible to perform certain tasks during a simulated test (e. g. , extensive travel, moving equipment, eliminating voice or data communication). (Testing Disaster Recovery Plans) It is a very effective way of testing and one of the most widespread. Full-interruption testing. A full-interruption test activates the total disaster recovery plan.
This test is costly and could disrupt normal operations. Therefore, it should be approached with caution. Adequate time must be scheduled for the testing. Initially, the test should not be scheduled at critical points in the normal processing cycle, such as the end of the month. The duration of the test should be predetermined to measure adequate response time. Various test scenarios could be planned to identify the type of disaster, the extent of damage, recovery capability, staffing and equipment availability, backup resource availability, and time / duration of the test.
The test plan should identify the persons responsible and the time they need to perform each activity. However, only part of the plan should be tested initially. This approach identifies the workability of each part before attempting a full test. Also, it may be best at first to test the plan after normal business hours or on weekends to minimize disruptions.
Eventually, unannounced tests can be performed to emphasize preparedness. (Testing Disaster Recovery Plans) This kind of testing is not so widely used but give very good results and allows seeing the whole picture of future disaster recovering on-air. The most popular, in my humble opinion is Parallel Testing. A parallel test can be performed in conjunction with the checklist test or simulation test. Under this scenario, historical transactions, such as yesterdays transactions, are processed against the preceding days backup files at the contingency processing site or hot-site.
All reports produced at the alternate site for the current business date should agree with those reports produced at the existing processing site. (Testing Disaster Recovery Plans) Why so popular? Because it costs less then full simulation and takes less time but still is very effective and give good results and full observation of the plan. As for the test frequency for organizations with a relatively new plan; a quarterly or semiannual test may be prudent for the first year. After this initial period, semiannual or annual tests should be required as a matter of policy.
It is better fro organisation if test is providing according to strict and understandable plan: Defining the test purpose / approach ; Identifying test teams; Structuring the test; Conducting the test; Analyzing test results; and Modifying the plans as appropriate. In order to avoid any critical mistakes and to fail the test recovery strategies must be defined accordingly to the recovery requirements of the organization. After that specific testing procedures should be developed to ensure that the written plans are comprehensive and accurate. If all that requirements are observed then your are on a way of building really good recovery plan.
Of course there is a staff question and such but after all Ive already mentioned what requires from staff in the training part of essay and it is not as important in our case as costs. All costs which concern recovery plans can be divided into three groups: personnel costs, on-going costs and capital. As for the capital costs A large volume of data will be gathered during various stages of the plan development. This data will be essential to the plan and has to be maintained on an on-going basis. There are several products on the market that have been designed to support the development, testing and maintenance of recovery plans.
These products are evaluated during Phase 2 of the project. The final cost depends on the product chosen. Other one-time costs may include the purchase of equipment related to establishing redundancy in the area of voice and data communications, data processing equipment (including personal computers), data processing emergency support and backup equipment (such as UPS, diesel generators, etc. ) and business equipment (photocopiers, FAX machines, etc. ) (Disaster Recovery Planning) On-going costs include rentals, services contracts and maintenance contracts. Why costs are so important?
The thing is, that often some organizations develop their recovering plans without dedicating the required resources to the effort. Implementing of such plans usually was very unsuccessful. Some companies failed to keep the recovery maintainence of such plans, mostly due to a lack of commitment to keep their plans current or to do regular testing of recovery capabilities. It is therefore essential, that management is committed to the development, implementation and maintenance of this program, that required resources are freed up during the development cycle and that a resource be dedicated to the on-going maintenance of the program. (Disaster Recovery Planning) The next things I want to discuss the most rapid ways of recovery. Dynamic replication of data is one of the best methods and it is fully justified fact. Cliff Spencer states This heightened focus on computer based business solutions dictates better methods for coping with downtime.
Typical traditional disaster recovery solutions for computer environments take days to put into action. Tape backup and hot site methodologies require some degree of recreation of the customer environment after the disaster. The amount of time required will vary but will always include the need to roll tape to restore the image present on the server prior to the disaster. Furthermore, some amount of information is typically lost during the switch to the hot site.
Tapes are only as good as the most recent backup. For businesses that cant afford lengthy tape restoration procedures and must capture the state of their systems as of the last transaction, a need exists for a much more rapid failover with no data loss. (Wishing You a Speedy Recovery) For business dynamic replication became an alternative to tradition backup and restore. New client server architectures gain respect in wide business ranks. It became possible architectures to continue operation in the face of total site loss thanks to the high speed communications, clustering, and client-server architectures.
According to Cliff Spencer The key concept behind geographical Failover is the ongoing replication of an entire site to another location. This is accomplished over the network and allows for very rapid transition to the replicate copy when required. A good example to illustrate Geo Failover is a site hosting a web server, though everything described below applies equally well to intranet applications and strictly server-side services. The problems to be solved are: 1.
How to allow continued access to your services after a catastrophe at the business site 2. How to efficiently and simply guarantee data access, even after site failure 3. How to automatically keep operations on-line after a total site failure (Wishing You a Speedy Recovery) Solution was found while using wide-area clustering (the elements of the cluster are spreading across a wide geography yields a system where failure of an entire site can be detected and remedied) and data replicating in one recovery process. How it works? Cliff Spencer provides us an example Lets say that vendor. com has a site in Trenton, a site in Los Gatos, a corporate fiber high bandwidth network link between those two locations, a wide-area disk mirror, and a geo cluster linking the two sites.
The Trenton site (web 1. 1. 1. 1) goes down (power failure). The wide-area cluster detects the failure within seconds and initiates automatic procedures to switch to the Los Gatos site. Network messages are sent to the DNS servers that are distributed around the internet, these all start handing out the new location for ww. vendor. com (2. 2. 2. 2). The wide-area cluster starts new copies of the server processes that will feed the web.
The business is back on-line. Their data is up-to-date, their window of downtime, most likely in the minutes range. (Wishing You a Speedy Recovery) Conclusion. As conclusion I want to say that if you became interested in disaster recovery planning it means that you make first steps fro improving your business. There are numerous sites where you can find all necessary information on this topic and as result you will avoid tremendous losses. Technologies which are used nowadays in recovery systems make it possible to recover business quickly, with minimal loss of the data and minimized disruption to customers. Disaster recovery planning is very useful prevention methods which usefulness just grows with ages.
Bibliography Jon Too, Disaster Recovery Planning: Strategies for Protecting Critical Information, 2 nd Edition, 2000. web Susan Bulgawicz and Charles E. Nolan, Information Disaster Planning: The Larger Perspective, Disaster Recovery Journal, Vol. 3 No. 3, p. 13. web The Disaster Recovery Guide, 2002. web University of Toronto, Computer Security Administration, Disaster Recovery Planning.
web Geoffery Wold, Testing Disaster Recovery Plans, Disaster Recovery Journal, Vol. 3 No. 3, p. 13. web Cliff Spencer, Wishing You a Speedy Recovery, Disaster Recovery Journal. web
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Research essay sample on Disaster Recovery Part 2
