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November - 2014 issue

Change from Disaster Recovery to Disaster Prevention

By Vignesh Anantharaj

For many companies subject to government and industry regulatory requirements, what was once simply good business practice are now mandatory compliance requirements. The cloud architectures have grown to a considerable extent. However many enterprises still run legacy applications that are not compatible with the cloud as the cloud is designed to host applications as virtual machines. This becomes a problem for mission critical applications that run on bare machines. Most of the times such situations pose as a hindrance, DRaaS provides need to accommodate this mismatch by providing physical applications within DR services.

Perhaps the major issue within DR today is with the view that responses to disasters need to be reactive. This thought process
needs to b changed to a preventive approach. The processes can be as simple as doing more with less in staff shortages, having a backup generator for power outages. The bottom-line is that vulnerabilities and consequences should be accurately identified. A business impact analysis cannot predict a disaster, but can certainly help in being prepared for one.

In this regard organizations need to welcome hindrances as a part of everyday processes. The occasional blizzard is always around the corner so proper precautions and an open mind can help. It can also useful to have a good social media strategy wherein the team is in control of the scenario instead of letting social media controlling the enterprises responses. Also, agencies need to understand policies on what non-emergency response information can employees give out to the public and the media. The heads of organizations need to know and understand your communication policies and protocols, especially during a disaster.

2015 promises to bring backup and DR back to the front, especially with the convergence of the various cloud offerings (private, public, & hybrid). Ultimately security and data encryption will get to a point where every organization is comfortable with a part of data residing off-site. We will have to wait and see what type of models are going to be conceptualized to blend into hybrid cloud deployments as decision points center on cost and availability.

Do let us know what you think.

Vignesh Anantharaj
Managing Editor
vignesh@cioreview.in