How to choose a third-party Disaster Recovery provider

Recently, this topic was discussed with one of my colleagues on LinkedIn, and I’ve decided to blog it as a part of “how to” series. I hope that it would help businesses of all sizes make an informed decision when selecting Disaster Recovery provider.

I would like to start with stating while this “how to” may cover both DR and BCP, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are different by definition, and would not recommend blending the two together when evaluating 3^rd-party vendors in that space. Both have to be looked at and planed for separately based upon organization risk tolerance and scope.

For example, a complete or partial structural damage to the head-office may constitute a disaster in the event and majority of business related activities as well as back-office systems reside within the same building. In that case, you will need to repatriate your core systems as well as core recovery team to another location where you can continue selling products or services while supporting your customers.

On the other hand, if an application server fails, and you cannot be down for more than 10 minutes due substantial loss of revenue, you will most likely follow business continuity protocols to ensure that services are restored by using a redundant system hosted either on premises or in a third-party facility. However, this by no means would grant declaration of a disaster.

When choosing a 3^rd-party provider, you must ensure that your organization receives priority in the event and you are forced to declare a disaster. For example, many DR vendors offer their services on a first come first serve basis, and while history has shown that larger providers will have the capacity when needed, this point must be taken into consideration and properly incorporated within the master services agreement. To reiterate, following tragic events of 9/11 in NYC, a good friend of mine served as a CIO of a large national health provider in New York City. His organization was forced to declare a disaster along with other companies affected by it. Fortunately, they had a tested DR plan and a reliable provider who had the facilities and the equipment available despite the fact that it had to provide services to many other customers simultaneously.

When selecting a third-party DR provider, you must ensure that you primary DR site is not;

• located in close proximity to any manufacturing facilities that use large quantities of harmful chemicals
• located in a high-crime area
• located in close proximity of rail-road
• located within close proximity to any strategic government buildings

and is;

• receiving priority diesel supply if running on power generators, i.e. some larger telco data centers will have priority as they are considered an “essential” service by the City

As far as facilities go, you must ensure that the facility is equipped as follows:

• sufficient rack space, power, voice and data
• sufficient storage
• fully equipped office space for the core recovery team
• sleeping quarters for employees that may need to work multiple shifts
• kitchen, bathrooms etc.
• sufficient parking space

As always, I welcome your comments.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz

Microsoft launches Office 365 as an aggressive approach to cloud applications

Based on Microsoft’s official press release, the company has launched a new cloud platform Microsoft Office 365. The new brand includes all features of Microsoft BPOS, i.e. Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,  as well as ever green Office desktop application such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint a.k.a. Office Web Apps, now available as a part of Office 365. In addition, it includes Microsoft Lync – Communications Server in the cloud.

By introducing a fully integrated suite of products in the cloud, Microsoft is set to raise the bar on the existing cloud offerings including those offered by the competition. It would be interesting to see if Google has something up their sleeve.

Read full press release

Official Microsoft Office 365 website