Disaster Recovery and Business A Rackspace White Paper Spring 2010 Summary The purpose of this guide is to cut through the jargon around Business and Disaster Recovery, explain the differences and help buyers find a solution that fits their needs. For more help making your choice, please contact Rackspace the home of Fanatical Support
Introduction This document is intended to explain the differences between Disaster Recovery and Business, introduce the concepts behind each and to enable the reader to make an informed decision on how best to prepare a plan to protect their business in the case of a disaster. Disaster Recovery and Business are terms that are often incorrectly thought to mean the same thing. However, they are both very different and if defined and planned for appropriately, are essential to any business. What does Disaster Recovery and Business mean? Business Business (BC) ensures the continuity of business critical functions in the event of a major unplanned service failure or disaster. This includes both technical and non-technical components, such as planning for power outages in offices or data centres, critical events affecting key staff, hardware failures, and compromise of data and virus attacks. All businesses should have a Business plan in place to protect themselves, their data and their customers. These plans are essential in any business, and full control and ownership of the plan should be retained internally at all times. Disaster Recovery Disaster Recovery (DR) is a component of a larger Business Strategy, and a good DR plan outlines how an organisation prevents and deals specifically with IT downtime created by local and regional failures and disasters. Planning for DR can start with simple measures such as utilising multiple disk drives in servers (e.g. RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, configurations), installing anti-virus software, and extend to backup plans, file replication, building redundancy into IT solutions, DNS failover and geographic load balancing and beyond.
Disaster Prevention Planning for Disaster Prevention should be a large part of a successful DR plan. If using a hosting company, their infrastructure should be built in such a way that the potential for disasters occurring at a data centre level is minimal. When planning to build any IT infrastructure, the configuration level should be fully explored to ensure that all necessary steps are taken to build redundancy and limit the possibility of disasters occurring. For example, ensuring all servers and network devices have multiple power supplies in case of failure, clustering servers to protect valuable database or email data, and encrypting data to prevent theft or misuse of data. The next step in planning an IT infrastructure is Disaster Recovery once the solution has been designed to be redundant to prevent disasters, how should it be built to enable swift recovery from a disaster? If high uptime is a vital requirement, then redundant infrastructure is essential. For most organisations, investing in a high availability infrastructure is a natural first step to ensure the solution against failure of any single component. This means that when a failure occurs, continuous service is maintained is maintained from the alternative infrastructure, enabling the original problem to be resolved with minimum user impact. For organisations looking for the ultimate peace of mind, a geographically redundant (i.e. twin data centre) solution may be justified. Retaining a mirrored solution in a geographically diverse data centre will enable swift recovery from a disaster with minimal downtime and data loss. However, a fully mirrored solution is an expensive option, so smaller businesses may seek to set up a smaller second site solution to maintain a minimum presence in case of disaster at the primary data centre. Why do organisations use Business (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Planning? There are many reasons that organisations use Business Planning and prepare a Disaster Recovery plan. At the most basic level, the continuing survival of the business and service of its customers is a large motivator, but industry regulation, board-level direction and compliance requirements often dictate a necessity for Business and Disaster Recovery Planning.
Planning for Disaster Prevention as part of a DR plan can help organisations to achieve various compliance standards, including PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), ISO27001 (International Organisation for Standardisation) and SAS-70 (Statement on Auditing Standards). PCI DSS is a set of comprehensive requirements for enhancing payment account data security; ISO27001 is an Information Security Management System standard, and SAS-70 is an international auditing standard, developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. All of these contain controls which should form part of a DR plan regardless of any compliance requirements. How can hosting companies add value? Most hosting companies will have built their hosting infrastructure around best practices and have attained various certifications (such as SAS-70, PCI-DSS and ISO27001) which show that they adhere to certain standards in security and processes. While these will give confidence and comfort to their customers, they also mean that in the case of a disaster the Hosting Provider should have recovery processes in place that have been audited and approved by external companies. Some hosting companies, including Rackspace, are able to offer data replication between data centres. This simplifies the setup of geographically redundant configurations and can help to reduce the time to recovery. In addition to this, there are four key factors that contribute to the overall availability of a managed hosted solution: 1. The quality of the hardware and software being offered 2. The SLA being offered by the hosting provider 3. The skills, experience and availability of the hosting providers support staff 4. The resilience of the solution architecture design These factors can be used in planning your DR and BC plans for example, knowing that a hosting provider such as Rackspace offers a one-hour hardware replacement SLA in the case of failed hardware will help to understand how to define Recovery Point and Time Objectives. What are Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives? These two terms are very important when planning for Disaster Recovery. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point in time prior to an outage in which systems and data must be restored to, or the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. This essentially asks the question how much data are you willing to lose during a disaster? In the case of an e-commerce site constantly taking orders, the RPO should be very low minutes as opposed to hours, to prevent loss of customer orders and details. However in the case of a relatively static site, such as an online brochure, this could be several hours or even days. The Recovery Time Objective is the length of time before full recovery is completed in the case of a disaster. E.g. how long can your site be inaccessible? If the site generates company revenue, then RTO should be low the longer the site is inaccessible, the greater the loss made.
What are the main areas to think about when planning for DR or BC? When planning for Disaster Recovery and Business, each area of business needs to be focussed on individually. Questions to ask include: What data and applications are critical to your business? Where are these hosted, and can they be recovered elsewhere in case of emergency? What level of application uptime is acceptable to your business? How can you achieve the required level of uptime? How critical is your data/application to business functions/processes? What are your RTO/RPO requirements? What are your DNS failover requirements? Office and data centre location if a catastrophic event occurs making either of these inaccessible, how to recover? Can staff work from home? Is there an alternate office or data centre that can be utilised? Office utilities power, water, Internet access, etc. In the case of an outage of any of these, are alternatives available at the office? If not, what measures are in place to ensure staff can still work? If an alternate location is available are staff and/or customers able to travel to and access it easily? Staff sickness in the case of a mass sickness amongst staff, what processes are in place for bringing in temporary staff or handing off responsibilities to other staff members? Conclusion Business Planning Business Planning is something that every business should commit to the complexity of the plan will depend on the complexity of the company and the uptime requirements of the organisation. This plan should take a very wide view of the entire business, all of its functions, dependencies and supplies. Disaster Recovery Planning Disaster Recovery Planning should look specifically at the Information Technology part of a business, and how it can be recovered quickly and with minimal data loss in the case of a disaster. Customer and uptime requirements will often dictate a large part of this plan. Planning for both Business and Disaster Recovery should always be an iterative process, and be regularly reviewed whenever any part of the organisation or systems changes. Additionally, all plans should be tested as regularly as possible to ensure that they are effective. An out of date or untested plan can be more dangerous than no plan at all. Working with Hosting Organisations Most hosting organisations should be able to assist customers with aspects of disaster recovery planning, usually specifically around the hosted infrastructure. Their data centre infrastructures should be built in such a way that some disaster prevention capabilities are included by default on all configurations. They may also be able to assist with configuring mirrored or replicated environments to provide geographic redundancy and failover to reduce the time to recovery. However, it should be noted that creating and maintaining a DR or BC plan is entirely the responsibility of the organisation that requires it. Hosting partners can assist with aspects of the plan, but the responsibility should not be handed over to them.