If it seems callous to be considering the fortunes of corporate entities in the wake of a humanitarian catastrophe like the one that befell Japan last month, that’s not the intention.

But the reality is, as much as the day-to-day life of that country’s citizens was devastatingly disrupted by this natural disaster, so, too, was the daily existence of the many businesses operating on this hard-struck island nation. And the same cold-blooded case could be made for companies that continue to beat the drum in North Africa or the Middle East, in the midst of the tumult that so furiously defines their geographic settings.

Be Ready When Stuff Happens

Today more than ever, businesses that rely on computers — which pretty much encompasses the lot — need to be mindful of the value of disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Stuff happens, after all. Risk managers are smart to reexamine their strategies governing how they’ll respond when it does, paying close attention to how their data are backed up and how they might be accessed if disaster strikes.

An organization’s ability to efficiently coordinate the resources of business continuity, incident response, disaster recovery and crisis management determines when — and if — it will return to its feet.

Some considerations to bear in mind as you revisit this important subject:

• Gartner estimates that a mere 35% of small and medium businesses have a disaster recovery plan in place.




• According to research by the University of Texas, only 6% of companies that suffer a catastrophic data loss survive. Forty-three percent never reopen and 51% close within two years.




• A survey by British consultancy firm CityIQ recently discovered that a quarter of polled organizations had not performed a crisis management test in the last 12 months.




• You should assume that no electronic copy of your recovery plan will be available in the event of a crisis. Keep an updated paper version near at hand.




• Stage your resources above flood levels and expect that the recovery process will take several weeks or even months to unfold.




• Consider cloud computing as an integral part of your disaster recovery strategy. Companies that aren’t confident about their in-house technology’s capacity for data recovery should investigate this emerging option and engage outside professionals to implement and manage it.




• How successfully a company recovers from a disaster is ultimately a function of the quality of its plan, the training around it and the testing that it’s undergone in advance of an actual disaster. Don’t forget the third leg of the stool: Your plan must be tested, and often, before it’s called into action.

360 Visibility’s XOsoft products offer a slew of comprehensive business continuity, high-availability and continuous data protection solutions to support organizations’ disaster recovery and data recovery software planning needs. Our WANSync, WANSyncHA and Enterprise Rewinder product suites ensure uninterrupted access to all types of file and application servers.

Progress, it turns out, does not always make the world better. In some cases, it just makes it more bloody complicated.

Complexity Breeds Disaster

Such is the apparent case, says Symantec—a security, storage and systems management solutions firm—in today’s disaster recovery scene. Many organizations are struggling to sustain the effectiveness of their security efforts in the face of an ever-more-complex technological landscape, reports Symantec in their recently released Disaster Recovery Study.

The report—Symantec’s sixth annual, undertaken to highlight business trends regarding disaster-recovery planning and preparedness—explains that disparate virtual, physical and cloud resources create an environment in which mission-critical applications and the data they house are in peril of becoming damaged, delayed or irretrievably lost. With nearly 60% of respondents using multiple tools to manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments today, it’s no surprise that security problems are rampant or that organizations are struggling, quite simply, with system overload.

Failing to Have a Back Up

Users, says the report, which polled IT managers of 1,700 large enterprises in 18 countries, are failing to back up a full 44% of data housed on virtual systems. Similarly, only 20% of respondents report employing replication and failover technologies to protect their virtual environments.

Respondents say that they conduct 82% of their backups on a weekly—at best—rate of frequency. And three-fifths of virtualized servers out there are not covered in respondents’ current disaster-recovery plans, up significantly from 45% in 2009.

Virtual Applications Causing Real Problems

In parsing its findings, the study uncovered a state of sincere confusion among data centre managers, suddenly charged with responsibility for managing and protecting a whole new slew of virtual applications and data. Some 58% of respondents cited protecting mission-critical applications in virtual and physical environments as a significant challenge their organization faces.

And so, while virtualizing servers and storage arrays are serious forces in today’s IT world, the means to adequately protect this new universe has not bloomed at the same pace. For the myriad of benefits virtualization and cloud offer the data centre organization, there’s no denying the heap of new concerns in whose company they travel.

Mastering the Cloud

The trick, then, is to master the management of this complex new reality responsibly, and with confidence. A better appreciation for the nuances of becoming a virtualized shop, a dedicated commitment to cloud computing and all that this brave new world entails, and an enhanced stream of information regarding how to properly back up data are critical to today’s companies, as they make the bridge into tomorrow.

Simply and Standardize

In the recommendations section of the study, Symantec’s director of its storage and availability management group, Dan Lamorena, says, “Data centre managers should simplify and standardize so they can focus on fundamental best practices that help reduce downtime.”

To that end, businesses need to review their data recovery plans with IT professionals, like those on offer through 360 Visibility. With these experts’ help, organizations can take the pains necessary to ensure the continuation of all their business-critical, IT-related systems—whether they be virtual, cloud or physical.

I’m not looking to ride the ink trails of Charles Dickens here, but it’s awfully hard to resist when he laid down so apt an all-purpose summary of a year. Because it is always the best of times—and the worst. A little of this, a little of that. Some highs, some lows. One day you’re an American journalist getting an escort from North Korea by Bill Clinton, the next you’re Taylor Swift and your stage is being stormed by Kanye.

Certainly if you were Miss California or Roman Polanski in 2009, you’ve had better revolutions through the lunar cycle. But if you were Susan Boyle or the guy who won that dream job on that Pacific Island, well, you had yourself a bit of a party over the last 12 months, didn’t you?

As for us here at 360 and our journey through the latest calendar pages, we feel confident laying claim to Dickens’ more positive category of assessment. Prominent among those best-of times was our growth. In spite of the so-called “recession,” we managed to pass another year in expansion mode.

Our growth rate over the last six months? 46 percent.

More than that, we hired six new people in the last four months of 2009 and, in December, moved offices to a spot that is almost triple the size our original space.

Rising above negative ambient circumstances seems to be our thing: we launched the company during the last recession.

As for the folks we served over 2009, I will say they are grateful and better off for their encounter with us. Smart companies did not hold onto their cash when the pace slowed; they upgraded their systems!! Imagine that, and some of the best deals are made during a recession. And today these folks purring with efficient operating structures that are poised to capture business from a recovering economy.

And what of the rest? Well, they’re kind of preoccupied right now with the matter of enacting a system upgrade of their own. Still running Windows Server 2000, 2003 or perhaps Windows XP or better yet Exchange 2000, 2003, 2007? Have a look at your daybook, fella: It’s 2010 and the latest technology is Win2008, Window7, Exchange2010.

Hmmm, what else of this past year? In April, the Standish Report released its latest survey: an increase challenge and failures of in ERP and CRM implementations, 44% and 24% respectively. No surprise there, eh. I’ve been doing this for 15+ years and the scene was ever thus. Hence, why 360 Visibility was established with its innovative Solution Centre of ERP/CRM implementation methodology.  Try it, nobody likes to be burnt twice.

Certainly server virtualization continued to grab the attention of companies wanting to do more with less. Plasma and LCD are dead; LED TV is here to stay. And the results finally came in for the Beta-vs-VHS debate – Blu-ray won. So why does your IT disaster recovery plan still include “Tapes” – please shelve them along with those 8Tracks. Resistance is futile – Remote Online Backup is taking over.

Traditional phone system vendors that have been around since the mastodons continued to play catch-up while true voice-over IP systems like those that hail from AltiGen, Cisco and Microsoft Unified Communications laid the true pavement for 2010.

2010, a new decade! Set your goals, because “Vision without Execution is Hallucination” This year will be the best of times.

But, like so many things during a time of transition, it’s a challenge to know which is the preferred route: new or old? Old-fashioned tape backup or online disaster recovery?

Data loss is very common.

Some statistics suggest that a full two-thirds of Internet users have suffered it, catastrophically. What’s more, research by the University of Texas reports that only 6% of companies that do, survive. Just the same, the Gartner Group estimates that just 35% of small to medium size businesses  have a disaster recovery plan in place.

Traditionally, magnetic tape has been the medium of choice for backup. Simple to use and unencumbered by lots of moving parts, tape enjoys a solid reputation for its capacity and durability. Tape is a sequential-access medium, so even though access times may be wanting, the rate of continuously writing or reading data can actually be very fast. And because it’s been around so long, its peculiarities and limitations are well understood.

But tapes have no shortage of weaknesses.

Tape backups are highly labour intensive and the real cost associated with producing them isn’t generally taken into account.

Worse still, organizations engaged in systematic tape-backup activities often neglect to test the results of their efforts, and are only made aware of their failings when they go to restore order after a major data loss and discover that the data were never backed up.

According to research from the Gartner Group, 71% of all tape restores fail.

I’m not surprised to witness a shift from tapes to online backups.

Online backup solutions are every bit as secure but come with a slew of cost-saving, flexibility and security bonuses, not the least of which is that users can perform backups remotely. While the occasional paranoid holdout might stick with tapes for a bit longer, this mode of data backup is clearly making way for the online model.

To that end, 360 Visibility’s Online Backup Solution and CA XOsoft products offer a whack of business continuity, high availability and continuous data protection solutions to support your disaster- and data-recovery software planning needs. Our WANSync, WANSyncHA and Enterprise Rewinder product suites ensure uninterrupted access to all types of files, MS SQL and Oracle Databases and MS Exchanges servers, even in disaster mode. Each offers unique capabilities that promise failsafe data backup for a company’s blood and guts—without a drop spilt.