 | |||
|
|
||
| |||
| |||
| |||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
| |
|
Home > Business continuity and disaster recovery planning guide for CIOs |
| |
|
|
|
|
| CIO Briefings: |
|
||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This CIO Briefing is part of the SearchCIO.com CIO Briefing series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic guidance and advice that addresses the management and decision-making aspects of timely topics. For a complete list of topics covered to date, visit the CIO Briefing section. Table of contents Business execs undercut value of DR planning Outage brightens outlook on virtualization CIOs not making time for business continuity Taking control with archiving DR plans for your data warehouse More disaster resources for CIOs
[Shamus McGillicuddy, News Writer] When it comes to disaster recovery, CIOs get it -- business execs don't. Not only do they undercut the importance of such planning, but they also fail to understand how technology failures can affect their companies, says a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive Inc. and sponsored by SunGard Availability Services. Seventy-one percent of IT executives identified business continuity and disaster recovery planning as very important or crucial to business success. Only 49% of business executives felt that way. "I'm a little surprised that overall, businesses are still lagging," said Mark McManus, vice president of IT research at Computer Economics Inc. in Irvine, Calif. "The idea of disaster recovery was always an IT process, but it has really morphed into business continuity, which is an overall company process more than just IT. In many businesses, business continuity isn't even controlled by IT."
[Shamus McGillicuddy, News Writer] LAS VEGAS -- When a series of electrical snafus took down the Las Vegas Valley Water District's (LVVWD) data center, its network administrators were vindicated. Yes, server virtualization really is a good idea. Senior network administrators Dave Trupkin and Greg Hearn told attendees at Gartner's Data Center Conference that they had begun converting a select number of the utility's 200 servers to virtualized servers in the years prior to the power failure to combat server sprawl. Trupkin had virtualized some infrastructure servers, installed two VMWare ESX host servers and introduced VMotion, which allowed him to move virtual servers from box to box with almost no downtime. As virtualization improved performance, Trupkin thought the results would increase acceptance of the technology in his organization. But the utility's developers were slow to do so. Every problem the developers had was now a virtualization problem, whereas before it would have been an application problem, Trupkin said. "We still didn't have full acceptance of VMWare," Trupkin said. "Until we had the disaster," Hearn added.
[Shamus McGillicuddy, News Writer] Many midsized to large companies have no business continuity plan. But it's not because they don't see the value in it. They just can't seem to get around to doing it. According to a survey sponsored by hardware and software vendor Hewlett-Packard Co., 55% of respondents said their companies couldn't agree on a technology solution for business continuity. Forty-nine percent said they simply didn't have time to plan. A lack of experienced internal resources was cited by 59% of respondents, and 34% said they lacked the data needed to make a business case for implementation. Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP surveyed 564 IT decision makers at large and midsized companies.
[Megan Santosus, CIO Decisions] Though some say e-discovery is the chief driver of archiving system adoption, there are many reasons to use the technology, such as freeing up storage space, improving system performance and providing for disaster recovery. At the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, CIO George Yacoub has to contend with the ever-growing volume of email in a Microsoft Exchange environment. "We have a lot of researchers who do most of their correspondence via email," Yacoub says. "The pressing issue for us is that users are running out of disk space." He recently deployed an archiving system from EMC Corp. to help manage storage and prevent the hospital's 1,700 end users from pushing inbox capacity -- currently 250MB -- to the limit.
[Wayne Eckerson, Contributor] When was the last time you reviewed and tested the business continuity and disaster recovery plan for your data warehouse? Do you even have a disaster recovery plan for your data warehouse? While natural and geopolitical disasters -- including tornadoes, thunderstorms and increases in oil prices -- are on the rise, they are not the biggest threats to your business intelligence (BI) environment. According to research by Information Age, a leading U.K. magazine for executives, most IT executives believe the greatest threats to the continuity of their IT operations are internal system failure (65%) and viruses (45%). Meanwhile, natural disasters registered at 32% and power and communications outages at 33%. Ten years ago, there was little need to create a disaster recovery plan for data warehouses and the reports and applications they support. At the time, the vast majority of data warehouses were loaded in batch on a monthly basis from a half-dozen or so source systems. Most loads were fairly small and even the biggest data warehouses were less than a couple of hundred gigabytes in size. Not surprisingly, most data warehousing teams didn't have a disaster recovery plan, let alone a backup strategy. The common sentiment back then was that if the data warehouse crashed, you could simply refresh the data warehouse in its entirety from source systems once everything came back online.
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
About Us | Contact Us | For Advertisers | For Business Partners | Site Index | RSS |
|
|
||
|
|||||||
