DALY DESIGN GROUP, INC.
WINTER PARK, FLORIDA

This blog is part of an Information Services, a.k.a. IT or Tech Services, leadership series that addresses the focus and alignment of the business’ use of technology. This series is intended for mid-market sized companies. It is written by an executive with extensive leadership experience in transforming information technology organizations that consults on aligning business and technology to provide better services while reducing costs and providing knowledge of leveraging technology and information to improve business processes. Jeff has extensive leadership experience in technology and business. Focuses on aligning the use of technology with the needs of the business in mid-market companies. Advises clients on application development processes, application systems/services (cloud based) selection and implementation, and their technology organization, strategies, and budgets. Communicates options and results in business terms with the client’s executives. He has held the position of CIO/VP of IT at Norwood Promotional Products, InterVoice, and Cyrix semiconductor and consulting leadership roles at Adobe, Tatum, and Lotus. Created two technology startups that were sold to Fortune 500 companies. Business Recovery Design The typical nature of most businesses consists of voluminous transactions and use of a variety of technologies, to service their numerous clients and vendors. Disruptions to normal business operations (NBO) can result in loss of revenue, assessed penalties, damage to reputation, and termination of client relationships. Thus, it is imperative that any adverse affects to NBO are minimized. Design of the recovery services is key to providing the technology-related services required to support the business’ plan for business continuity. This design of the technology solution is based on needs of the business, customers, and vendors, along with the economic considerations. This solution is designed to be simple, as it will need to be effective under a variety of high-pressure situations. There are two approaches to providing technology services that address the requirements in a typical business continuity plan: Designed Avoidance and Designed Continuity. Designed Avoidance is the implementation of a “bullet-proof” environment that is intended to withstand any type of disturbance. Designed Continuity is how the continuity is addressed using the current capabilities, both automated and manually. The associated risks and impacts inform the design of the recovery services. The scope of the risk, which is driven by the business continuity plan, is a direct influence on how the recovery of the supporting technology services are designed. To design outage avoidance into an environment, i.e., a fully redundant environment that will withstand all types of disasters, there are a couple of major components that need to be in place and these are listed below. Note, that while this approach sounds extensive, this design also provides a simplified approach to regular IT operational activities. The typical Data Center Colocation facility (e.g., CyrusOne, RackSpace, etc.) provides many of the features required to support a business continuity plan. Since these facilities are selling and competing on their capabilities, they provide redundancies for power, air conditioning, networking, security, and environmental monitoring that exceed the requirements for their large customer base, and they offer all of this for a reasonable rate. They are also audited on a regular basis and can provide a high level of assurance for all customers. In addition to what a single Data Center Colocation facility can provide, a secondary data center colocation facility can extend the capabilities dramatically. When the secondary facility is located a “safe” distance (generally suggested separation is 200-300 miles to address regional concerns) from the primary facility, outage issues that arise regionally, e.g., regional power grid problems, regional internet access issues, etc., can be readily addressed. By using the primary/secondary data center design as the base, the basic redundancy capabilities are in place. To expedite the switch over between the primary and secondary sites, Server Virtualization is utilized. Virtualized servers can be configured in a virtualized environment to be easily moved among physical servers, whether the servers are located in the same data center or different data centers. Combined with Replicated Data, this provides for a very effective means to support continuous operations. To complete the Designed Avoidance picture, and in addition to virtualizing the servers, the desktop/laptop environments are virtualized. By virtualizing the systems that the users need to conduct business, the user can easily use any device (that is supported by the virtualization client) in any location that has an adequate network connection. No matter what condition, the user consistently sees their familiar desktop. This type of virtualized desktop provides a great deal of flexibility and simplicity in a variety of disaster recovery scenarios. Alternatively, Cloud Computing capabilities can be utilized instead of owning hardware in the Primary and/or Secondary Data Centers. With Cloud Computing, server and network resources can be dynamically allocated to address a variety of needs required for business continuity and the fees are based on the amount of resources allocated and can also transparently support the primary/secondary switching to further simplify the overall operations. This Designed Avoidance approach also addresses the needs of regular outages that are currently scheduled weekly for maintenance and application updates. Instead of always updating the primary data center servers, requiring outage time to accomplish, to update applications and system software, the secondary data center servers would be treated as the staging environment where all of the updates would be made and tested in an offline mode. Then, when successfully confirmed, the secondary data center would be switched to be the primary data center and the primary data center would then become the secondary data center. This switch could be accomplished with consistent downtime in minutes rather than hours. In the case when the updates need to be rolled back, the switch can be done again to revert the systems back to their state before the switch occurred. This also helps in regularly testing these configurations for when they would be needed for a business continuity/disaster recovery event.