Imagine not having access to your client records or other critical data because your computer died.  Have you thought about how you would be able to recover that important information?  What is the cost of not having that information available to you quickly?  Can your business continue to operate without the information? 

If you are serious about your business, you need to make sure to protect it.  Too often, everyone hears horror stories of how people wished they had a data backup and business continuity plan in place before they had a disaster.  It is only a matter of time before a disaster affects your important business data. 

SHBO Technologies is dedicated to protecting your business.  We manage your computer / IT business continuity and help you with your overall business continuity plan. 

During the month of February 2012, SHBO Technologies will develop a Computer/IT Business Continuity Plan at no cost to you (normally $800).  We will also give you one month of our Simplified Business Continuity Standard service at no cost.  We want you to benefit from the experience of having SHBO Technologies protect your business data. 

This special offer is only available during the month of February.  In order to qualify, please contact SHBO Technologies at 561-283-0825 or at info@shbo-tech.com by Wednesday, February 29. 

“Peace of mind with your computers.  Guaranteed.”

For More Details Contact:

SHBO Technologies, LLC

510 Business Park Way, Suite B

Royal Palm Beach, FL 33411

561-283-0825

bwoods@shbo-tech.com

www.shbo-tech.com

While cloud computing is a familiar term, its definitions can vary greatly. So when it comes to online backup, the cloud is an important feature that can play a large role in securing and protecting during a disaster, which I like to refer to as “cloud recovery.” 

In order to be worthy of this cloud recovery title, a solution should have the following five features.

1. Recover Workloads in the Cloud – There is an old saying in the data protection business that the whole point of backing up is preparing to restore. Having a backup copy of your data is important, but it takes more than a pile of tapes (or an online account) to restore. You might need a replacement server, new storage, and maybe even a new data center, depending on what went wrong. The traditional solutions to this need are to either keep spare servers in a disaster recovery data center or suffer the downtime while you order and configure new equipment. With a cloud recovery solution, you don’t want just your data in the cloud — you want the ability to actually start up applications and use them, no matter what went wrong in your environment.
2. Unlimited Scalability – If you were buying disaster recovery servers for yourself, you would have to buy one for each of your critical production servers. The whole point of recovering to the cloud is that they already have plenty of servers. The ideal cloud recovery solution won’t charge you for those servers up front but is sure to have as much capacity as you need, when you need it. Under this model, your costs are much lower than building it yourself, because you get the benefit of duplicating your environment without the cost.
3. Pay-Per-Use Billing – I love pay-as-you-go business models because they force the vendor to have a good product. Plus, this make the buying decision much easier — just sign up for a month or two (or six), and see how it goes. Removing the up-front price and long-term commitment shifts the risk away from the customer and onto the vendor. The vendor just has to keep the quality up to keep customers loyal. We also know that data centers are more cost-efficient at larger scale, especially the management effort, and they require constant improvement. In your own data center, you might have some custom configurations, but in the data recovery data center, you just need racks, stacks of servers, power and cooling. You are much better off paying a monthly fee to someone who specializes.
4. Secure and Reliable Infrastructure – Lots of people like to bash cloud providers for security and reliability, but I think they hold the providers to the wrong standard. Although it is fine, in the abstract, to point out all the places where cloud providers don’t achieve perfection in security and reliability, as a customer evaluating a cloud vendor, it seems better to compare them to your own capabilities. I believe that most of the major cloud providers’ infrastructures are more secure and more reliable than those of most private data centers. The point is that security and reliability are hard, but they are easier at scale. Having control over your own data center isn’t enough — you also have to spend the money to buy the necessary equipment, software, and expertise. For most companies, infrastructure is a necessary evil. Companies like Amazon and Rackspace do infrastructure for a living, they and do it at huge scale. Sure, Amazon’s outages get reported in news, but do you think you can outperform them over the next couple of years?
5. Complete Protection – Remember the “preparing to restore” line? It really comes home in this idea of complete protection. If your backup product asks you what you want to protect, we are already suspicious. Our vote is, “get it all.” We see lots of online products offering 20GB plans, and to me, they look like an accident waiting to happen. I don’t want to know which files I need to protect — I want to click “start” and know that any time I want, I can click “recover”, and there won’t be any “please insert your original disk” issues. The places people normally get bitten by this are with databases (do you have the right agent?), configuration changes (patched your server, or added a new directory of files?), and weird applications (the one that a consultant set up, and you don’t really understand how it works). Complete protection means that all of these things can be protected without requiring an expert in either your own systems, or with the cloud recovery solution.

 Disaster recovery is a term often used in Information Technology (IT) circles to describe the necessity for backup technology systems to safeguard an organization’s data.

While this type of safeguard is absolutely a necessity to protect valuable data, and also reduce the amount of time your organization will need to recover from an incident, a true disaster plan goes far beyond backup servers and drives. For example, when disaster strikes, what plan does your organization have in place to communicate, both internally and externally? How will your organization ensure it can get your personnel to your hot site? An IT disaster recovery plan is only a small part of an overall business cntinuity plan (BCP), continuity of operations plan (COOP), or comprehensive emergency management plan (CEMP). 

The most important aspects of an effective disaster recovery is planning and training, which both need to be done far ahead of the event. The planning process is more important than the plan itself. 

Key Considerations in Disaster Planning – Every organization, at some point in time, will face a disaster, whether it’s a power outage, data center meltdown or a major hurricane.In order to efficiently respond, there are some key processes that must be implemented throughout an organization.

Disaster Procedures – Develop a set of procedures for each disaster scenario. Some key questions to ask: What is the chain of command and lines of succession? How is evacuation handled, if necessary? What about accountability for our employees, on-site vendors and visitors? What’s the fallback procedure? If communications are completely down, what actions can be taken without any authorization from management? What are the automatic triggers to act?  Each set of procedures should include:

• Methods of contact and communication. This should include multiple methods for the entire enterprise.
• Determine the chain of command.
• Designate disaster authorities.
• List of your alternative works spaces including primary base of command/operations.
• Data backup: This should include a detailed description on how data is backed up normally (day-to-day) and where it can be found and “turned on” for the company in an event of an emergency. In addition, there should be emergency back-up instructions in the case of evacuation or the like.
• What/where vital equipment and supplies are to keep running your business. What are the mission critical functions of the organization?

 Disaster Plan – Appoint a planning group comprised of the stakeholder departments and programs within your organization to take ownership of the plan and its components. There should also be an operational component that will have personnel responsible for each aspect of the plan when the plan is activated. This component also needs redundancy built in. For example, designate several personnel who will oversee employee communication, and several that are responsible for customer communication. When developing your plan, consider your organization’s vulnerabilities, which can include location, security threats, etc. Your disaster plan should include: 

• Redundancy: This is extremely important to data centers as they contain the lifeblood of many organizations. This means that there are backup systems and an alternative means of communications.
• Evacuation plans: The most important resource to any organization is its people and their knowledge. It’s important to get everyone out of harm’s way and working in a safe environment. Make certain that your key business functions can/will be moved with answers as to where and/or how.
• How do people keep working? It is imperative your disaster plan speaks to how people can access information or services in the wake of a disaster.
• Communications: A vital element in any disaster/contingency plan is communications. As with any issue that arises in an enterprise, communicating with the organization, customers, prospects, partners and other audiences about what is happening, why it’s happening and when they can expect to be back “online” will help stem general irritation, rumors and the like. Having a secure portal for employees can allow a company to communicate effectively and efficiently to employees to convey expectations i.e. report/don’t report to work/work remotely/report to designated offsite location(s).

 Testing and Trying – Having a solid plan in place before disaster strikes is only the first step in proper preparedness. In order for it to work during the event, it needs to be tested for prior to an event. Testing must have the participation of the entire organization. Testing should also be done frequently to address plan, system, personnel and organizational changes. An effective testing program should be done at least semiannually. The challenge with this portion of preparedness is not only finding the time to effectively test the plan, but also motivating employees to participate fully on top of their day to day work demands. It is recommended that an education and communications program include real-life scenarios. There is no reason why the program can’t incorporate some fun into it as well, so it’s seen not as an obligation, but as a break from work! Aside from testing systems, “Rehearsals” or role-playing should be part of the program as well. As part of this program, there are announced rehearsals. However, there are also unannounced exercises/drills that should always be promoted as a test of the plan. You want to find gaps and shortfalls in your plan so that when a real disaster occurs you are better able to deal with the incident, even if the exact scenario does not unfold. If the exercise is announced, care should be taken to keep the scenario from the players, and have some unplanned events occur during the exercise (i.e. physical, emotional or psychological unavailability of key personnel/leadership). 

Disaster planning is really about the process and less about the technology for disaster recovery. The plan should serve as the framework and general direction to follow but, as previously noted, cannot take into account every scenario or contingency. There is no way to train for all disasters. However, having a strong, all-hazards based core plan with policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to guide management and employees during a disaster will ensure your organization’s survival. The disaster plan does not tell you how to do your job, but rather how to do your job in a compressed timeframe, under stress, and possibly without all your organizations resources in place.

Call us at 561-283-0825 for more information or to get started protecting your business today!!