Although disaster recovery planning is never easy or straightforward, it’s especially delicate when data centers are included in the mix. The density of equipment and the mission-critical nature of these facilities make it especially important to get the DRP (disaster recovery plan) right.

As data center managers build DRPs that fit their organizations’ needs and minimize risk, there are many potential problems that they must be able to resolve.

Failure To Adapt To Change

Simply having a disaster recovery plan is not enough; companies must also maintain it over time.

“Building a plan is hard, but many companies do it well. Maintaining a plan is much harder, and few companies do it well,” says Michael Miora, president of ContingenZ (www.contingenz.com). “Maintaining a plan means making the business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery plan (DRP) a process rather than a project and incorporating that process into the corporate culture and procedures.”

To accomplish this, Miora says long-term commitment is needed, which involves ongoing communication.

“The most common issue arises when a business function does things differently from how they used to do it when the plan was built, but nobody told the BC/DR people,” says Miora. “IT therefore doesn’t have the right data or equipment available in a timely fashion. Everybody loses.” Communication is key to avoiding problems with changes to the DRP.

A Culture That Misunderstands Funding

Too many organizations view the DRP as a drag on the bottom line. In doing so, they fail to understand the DRP’s critical contributions to ongoing operations. Jim Grogan, vice president of consulting product development at SunGard Availability Services (www.availability.sungard.com), says IT is instrumental in helping the rest of the business understand the connection between the DRP and business continuity management.

“Customers relate to us that they are continually challenged to support the funding of continuity programs,” says Grogan. “Missed in this search for the continuity ROI is the fact that business dependency on information has fueled the growth of companies.”

He adds, “Operational efficiencies from just-in-time supply chains help organizations reduce operating costs significantly. A portion of the cost saving can fund the increased costs associated with failover solutions.”

Invisibility Of The Business

Although IT has honed its ability to restore service after an outage, Kelly Lipp, chief technical officer and vice president of manufacturing for STORServer (www.storserver.com), says it could do a better job understanding the outage’s impact on business operations and using that understanding to guide its response.

“Most of us are pretty good at fixing the problem, especially if we have enough time and even if we’ve never done it before,” says Lipp. “Where we often fail is quickly deploying resources and processes to continue the business while we’re solving the problem.”

He advises IT to work closely with business leaders to list potential disaster scenarios, prioritize them, and develop a comprehensive response plan that includes specific steps designed to maintain operations during restoration activities.

Lipp says organizations must understand that disasters can take on many forms—not just massive events seen in movies. Less apocalyptic disasters may include failures of mission-critical application servers, network outages, network intrusions, other infrastructure failures, and employee tampering. Lipp says close IT/business partnerships can drive more refined response plans.

“The solution is to realistically consider what disasters we are likely to face, categorize these based on their likelihood, and develop a comprehensive plan to restore the failure along with a plan to continue to do the business while we are restoring,” he adds.

Misplaced Involvement Of Organizational Resources

George Wu, director of software business for the IT Platform Group at NEC Corp. Of America (www.necam.com), says business continuity and DR must be fully supported throughout the organization, not just by IT.

“It is and should be a C-level agenda item,” says Wu. “Companies that approach BC/DR from a C-level make it an ongoing project that starts with assessment, moves to planning, and then implements a phased rollout addressing the most critical needs first.”

Wu advises data center managers to work closely with the rest of the organization on business impact assessment.

“First look at all of the areas within the data center where there is the possibility of disruption to determine where downtime, data loss, or lack of access might have the highest business impact,” he says.

IT should also extend its focus outside the organization. “Start a dialogue with external stakeholders,” says David Guerra, an IT consultant with extensive experience supporting clients during and following major disasters such as hurricanes (www.daveguerra.com). “Get involved with their disaster recovery plan, almost to the point that your organization and the organization of the external stakeholders will create an overlap in plans.”

Guerra says missing this step can result in serious delays in implementing the DRP—or worse, in recovery efforts.

by Carmi Levy