– Bob Roudebush, vice president of marketing at Neverfail (www.neverfailgroup.com), says:
Most issues that occur during a disaster result from the IT organization not understanding the applications that depend on access rights and where they are stored. When it is stored externally to the application, many organizations fail to adequately ensure directory services and access rights management is available at the disaster recovery site. When it is stored and managed as part of the application, many times that information is not protected at all. A great example of the latter is any application that depends on Microsoft SQL Server databases. One common approach to SQL protection is to use built-in features such as log shipping or database mirroring. What many IT administrators fail to understand is that these features only protect user databases, not the system databases SQL uses to store things such as database roles and system jobs for access rights management.
The best way to be prepared is to have a complete understanding of the applications that are critical to the organization and what interdependencies those applications might have. This includes, of course, access rights. If applications depend on external directories for access rights, ensure you have a strategy in-place to protect those directory services. If applications have built-in directory services and access rights management, ensure that the protection strategy you use for them is comprehensive and protects not just the data but application-level configuration information such as access rights.
There are a variety of other everyday causes, such as computer or server malfunctions, power outages, and more, that can lead to organization unplanned downtime. Be sure those who need access or who will need to respond when disaster strikes can do so – lack of preparedness will impede the ability to respond as well as impact the brand, and more than likely have financial repercussions.
Costs can vary based on the approach involved. At one end of the spectrum are backup solutions which typically are the cheapest to deploy but provide the worst protection because they only backup data periodically anddon’t provide any automated monitoring and recovery capabilities, reducing both the organization’s RPO and RTO. At the high-end of the cost scale are expensive disk-based and fault tolerant hardware solutions which provide improved RPO and RTO but typically can cost tens orhundreds of thousands of dollars. Many application-specific protection technologies or 3rd party niche solutions can provide good protection at a more affordable cost in many cases.
There are a variety of other everyday causes, such as computer or server malfunctions, power outages, and more, that can lead to organization unplanned downtime. Be sure those who need access or who will need to respond when disaster strikes can do so – lack of preparedness will impede the ability to respond as well as impact the brand, and more than likely have financial repercussions.
