Catastrophes and contingencies

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/recovery/story/0,10801,81373,00.html

By Salvatore Salamone
Bio-IT World
MAY 20, 2003

For years, companies have prepared for the worst. And that was before
Sept. 11, 2001. In the wake of that tragedy, perceptions of how to
safeguard corporate data have changed. The lessons learned from the
World Trade Center catastrophe have formed the blueprints that life
science companies must adopt to ensure survival after a disaster.  
The key shift in disaster-recovery planning since Sept. 11 is termed
business continuance planning, which builds upon the time-honored,
back-up-everything-on-tape disaster-recovery method.

In the event of a disaster, business continuance planning looks for
ways to quickly restore day-to-day operations and prevent the loss of
critical company data. Business continuance planning also strives to
improve the efficiency of normal day-to-day operations, providing
methods to smooth out small glitches that can lead to loss of data,
productivity, or business.

While backing up data to tapes that are stored securely offsite
remains essential, business continuance planning relies on additional
methods to facilitate disaster recovery.

Data mirroring - where data are replicated to a second live data
center—is a crucial component of a thorough business continuance plan.  
The idea is to have a copy of all vital data online at a second site.  
This does not preclude backing up the data to tapes - indeed, the
combination of mirroring and tape backup inspires confidence that no
data will be lost in a major disaster.

"Backing data up to tapes on a daily basis is still our safety net,
but we were concerned that the time required to retrieve data from
offsite storage after a major disaster would be significant," says
David O'Neill, network administrator at a specialty drug manufacturer,
which O'Neill did not want named. "That's one reason we looked at
replicating data to multiple sites. It ensures that data are always
available to our staff."

But data mirroring is not cheap. "Tapes are still relatively
inexpensive compared to disk drives," O'Neill says. "Data mirroring
requires almost double the disk space as is required to store the
original data."

One approach to data mirroring is real-time data replication to
offsite storage devices, which has the advantage of virtually no data
loss if the primary site is out of commission. The downside, however,
is that moving large files - medical images, for example - throughout
the business day could clog WAN connections and retard applications
that access the data. Alternatively, data can be copied to offsite
storage systems during down times, when network usage is not as high.

In either case, technology can help expedite the data transfer
process. Data caching and compression are commonly applied to files
before offsite transfers. Products from companies such as Peribit
Networks Inc. reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent between
two locations. Peribit's tools use algorithms that search data for
patterns and build tables that store identifying labels. Any time the
same patterns are detected after the labeling process takes place,
only the labels (and not the actual data) are transmitted to the
secondary site.

Procedures count

One lesson learned after Sept. 11 was that business continuance
requires more than brute force technical solutions. For example, some
large companies affected by the World Trade Center collapse that also
had secondary data centers in other cities discovered that the
existence of those centers was not enough to restore normal
operations.

"There was always the assumption that if a major data center was lost,
you could always put IT staff on an airplane and get them out to a
backup data center, so they could get vital business systems up and
running," says Raymond Lopez, a consultant at Rosewall and Associates,
an IT consulting firm. "This was not possible for several days after
September 11, since domestic travel was completely shut down." Of
course, this assumes that IT staff would be available to travel.  
Several companies lost many or all of their IT personnel on Sept. 11.

But correctly following backup procedures does not insure that all
vital data will be preserved, either. "Firms were more vulnerable than
expected to the amount of data still stored on paper or on users'
desktops," says Nicholas Parks, an analyst at TowerGroup, a global
services research firm.

For these reasons, Parks says, business continuance planning "now
considers human and environmental factors in a disaster, with the goal
of continuous availability and performance of the business, rather
than just the restoration of operations in hours or days following a
catastrophe."

Lopez agrees: "Disaster recovery is as much about developing policies
and practices and putting those things into place, as it is installing
hardware and software systems."

Life science companies would do well to follow the procedures
implemented by the financial industry post-Sept. 11. For instance, to
minimize the loss of crucial business information stemming from damage
to papers or desktop computers, many companies are scanning paper
documents as soon as they are created or received. Additionally, many
comanies are limiting the amount of data an employee can store locally
on his or her desktop, transferring more data to networked storage
systems that are regularly backed up.

Planning costs

"Preparation is the key to ensure that businesses can quickly rebound
after a disaster," says Tony Adams, principal analyst at Gartner's IT
services group. "Businesses now more widely understand that they must
prepare in advance to meet the challenges of a disaster."

But many companies are finding they don't have the money to get
started. In a recent Gartner survey of 205 IT managers, 24% of the
respondents said that lack of funds was preventing implementation of a
disaster-recovery plan. One in three companies even admitted they
would lose critical data or operational capability if a disaster
occurred. And 37% indicated they needed additional funding to carry
out their disaster-recovery plan.

The irony here is that if companies don't spend money in advance on
disaster-recovery planning, they will spend far more after a disaster.  
Knowing this, some life science managers are justifying the costs of
disaster-recovery planning and implementation by showing upper
management tangible savings that such systems and procedures bring in
other areas. "I try to show my CIO that any investment in disaster
recovery saves us money in our day-to-day operations," says Charles
Mitchell, director of IT at a New Jersey pharmaceutical company
research center. "The same systems and procedures that would give us
access to data in a disaster can be used to improve normal systems
availability."

Mitchell notes that disaster-recovery data-mirroring techniques can
also be used to access data during routine maintenance or backup of
storage systems. "The selling point isn't, 'Let's spend all this money
in case of catastrophe,' it's more, 'Here's what we need to keep
everyone happy during normal conditions, and, by the way, for no
additional money we cover our [behinds] in case of a major disaster.'"

Mitchell is not alone in employing this strategy. "Developing a
[return on investment] proposal for security or disaster-recovery
systems is difficult," Lopez says. "But showing management that
investments in IT systems will improve the resiliency of existing
systems and reduce day-to-day operational costs makes a much stronger
case."

Most companies will thankfully never experience a disaster akin to
Sept. 11. But virtually all companies experience short-term
disruptions of their systems and consequently are developing plans
that deal with mundane problems to reduce downtime.

Life science IT managers need to ensure the availability and
resiliency of their systems. Virtually all companies have systems in
place to keep the business running when minor glitches, such as power
disruptions, play havoc on operations.

Question of survival

In a survey of 163 business managers by the consultancy Contingency
Planning Research and Contingency Planning & Management magazine, 7%
of companies said their survival would be at risk if systems went down
for one hour. An additional 17% would be at risk if the outage lasted
one business day.

"We could probably survive an outage for several hours or a day or
so," says Jon Benson, network systems administrator at Neurome, which
studies gene-expression patterns in brain function and diseases. But
it would be highly disruptive. "We do data acquisition at night where
the data is written to [storage] by robotic microarray systems, and we
do data analysis during the day," Benson says. With company systems
running 24 hours a day, "lost time means lost opportunity. It would
also hold up research for our customers." Benson uses APC's
InfraStruXure system for power protection.

Common problems can provide useful ways to justify the cost of
business continuance planning. Take, for example, overheating. When
data centers housed primarily mainframes, it was assumed that cooling
requirements were uniform throughout the center. Today, most data
centers are built around racks of high-performance equipment, which
instead create "heat islands."

Surprisingly, however, few companies are searching for more efficient
ways to cool their data centers, according to Hewlett-Packard Co. Many
apparently believe that cooling will draw more attention as
higher-performance, high-density systems are deployed. Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories is working on more intelligent cooling and believes it
can cut data center energy consumption by 25%, perhaps saving a
company with an average data center about $1 million annually.

Improving the normal operations of a data center can yield
quantifiable savings in operational costs. This in turn can help an IT
manager make a case for investing in systems that will save a company
in the event of the unthinkable.

[...]



-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.