The problem with emergency drills

What’s wrong with emergency drills?

Probably we’ve all, at some point in time, had to take part in an emergency drill. The inconvenient fire drill, the lifeboat drill or the restore from backup (I hope you have all practised this one).

What’s wrong with emergency drills? Well almost without exception there is one thing missing;

THE EMERGENCY!

We all react differently to situations and when we are practising in a controlled manner, some of us tend to do things correctly, while others are rather blasé about the whole thing and yet others do it because they have to but believe it will never happen to them.

Well I’m not suggesting that you set fire to your building to make sure that the fire drill works, neither am I asking you to sink the next ferry/cruise ship you are travelling on, but there is a situation that I expect a lot of us have been in and many have had an unsatisfactory outcome.

I’m talking about the day you need to restore from backup.

Here’s the deal – Large enterprises probably have a solid back up process that they have run for years and they test the restore on a regular basis (I say probably because we know some that don’t). They might use tape or disk with either off site or remote site duplication/storage. They have the resources and the time.
But as we start to look at the smaller enterprises and the SME community we increasingly find that backup is treated as a necessary activity but one that is more of a tick in the box than a crucial or valued cog in the operational discipline.

One of my colleagues was recently presenting to a number of IT professionals at a Special Interest Group (SIG) and asked the question when was the last time they tested their backup and restore process (by actually doing a restore). 25 out of the 30 in the room had never tested the restore even though they backed up regularly!

Why?

Because it was complicated, took a lot of time and probably they didn’t believe they would ever have to.
This begs the question - how do they know their backup is working?

Think about your IT. Bits of it will fail on a fairly regular basis; a laptop here, a server there, a storage array or a mobile device.

• How do you recover?
• What is the impact on your time and your business?
• What is the potential cost of the information that you could lose?
• How is your backup stored?
• How quickly can it be restored?

We have now solved our issues with a service we are privileged to represent that allows easy, controlled and consistent backup of the entire IT estate from the most complex databases and infrastructure requirements to the most fundamental mobile computing devices. It allows for efficient optimised onsite and offsite storage to allow rapid restoration or complete disaster recovery.

Gone is the constant reliance on someone to make sure that the tape backup has been completed and that the offsite copy has been collected. Gone is the need to make sure that someone is responsible when the usual person is on holiday.

The risk of human error in the backup process is all but eliminated.

Restoration testing can be performed at any time and for the required individual elements of your infrastructure. When the CEO has lost a phone you can restore his information straight away. When the Finance database has taken a turn for the worse and month end is rapidly approaching you can have it back up and running in a trice and when the building has burnt down you only really need to concentrate on what you should have learnt in the fire drill!