disaster recovery best practices

www.planb.co.uk © Plan B Disaster Recovery Ltd 2013

Disaster RecoveryBest Practices

www.planb.co.uk


Disaster Recovery – Best practice webinar

Agenda

• Introduction

• Do you need IT Disaster Recovery protection?

• How best to handle an IT disaster

• How technology is helping

• The Plan B service – affordable certainty & simplicity

• Case studies

• Q&A

• Close


About Plan B

• Plan B is a specialist IT disaster recovery service provider.

• We have a 100% recovery record and a 100% customer satisfaction record.

• We guarantee instant recovery and availability of core business systems.

• We are technical leaders in our field and were named Specialist Business Continuity Company of the year 2012

• We understand security & service management

• We protect large and small customers and simple and complex environments

• We provide subcontract DR services to other service providers


• Disasters do happen and particularly to IT systems!

• IT disasters are unpredictable and can effect any business

• Reliance on IT is so complete most businesses can’t operate without it and business and reputational damage quickly mount up

• 80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within 18 months*

• 90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster close within 2 years*

Plan B – Certainty & Simplicity

Why have a robust disaster recovery provision?

* www.fsb.org.uk/thamesvalley/info/community


• No one wants to pay for DR.

• Tendency to be optimistic in DR planning – supported by some suppliers. Nothing will be as easy as was assumed

• The DR plans are difficult to build and maintain and ruinously costly to test properly – so they almost never are.


Why do plans and provisions often fail?

Compared to the costs of a disaster a good DR provision will seem very cheap


Plan B in Recovery

• Like all catastrophes IT disasters usually are the result of multiple failures as much as one biblical event.

• Loss of IT systems will rapidly affect and paralyse entire organisation.

• Extent of problem may be very hard to assess and much Information needed to recover will be out of date or unavailable.

What is the nature of an IT Disaster?

• The unexpected will happen.

• Uncertainty will greatly hider or prevent decisive action.

• Many things will be harder than expected.

• Issues can multiply and crisis can quickly turn to chaos.


• Have a DR provision that makes recovery certain to work – this will empower you and enable you to take back control

• Have a DR provision that makes your recovery plan as simple as possible – KISS

• Speed of recovery – especially for communications systems will enable you to be more decisive and effective

• The combination of the above will enable you to cope with the widest range of potential disasters and put you in the strongest position to successfully handle them

• Have an affordable solution that still does all the above

• Outsource to a ‘independent’ specialist


How to best handle an IT disaster


• Virtualisation has made recovering to different hardware much easier and enabled automation of the process

• Virtualisation has also made it practical to be able to syndicate use of hardware and services whilst delivering a very high service level.

• Cloud platforms can potentially cut costs.


Technology is helping at last

Affordable DR solutions that work are now possible but don’t be fooled – easier doesn’t mean it will always work


• The Plan B service was conceived to solve not only the technical issues of copying and successfully recovering working servers quickly and completely reliably, but also to help reduce the associated issues that accompany an IT disaster by making such a process fast and very simple for the customer.


Plan B – Affordable Certainty & Simplicity

• Our fundamental approach and the use of our own specifically developed technology means we can offer a better, more certain, more simple service at a much lower cost.

• Therefore ultimately a more successful service which gives customers a much greater degree of protection.


Plan B ‘Pre-Recovery’

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - Minutes Recovery Point Objective (RPO) < 24 hours (<15 mins. with Enhanced service)

Recovery is complete, providing working systems in a working network with firewalls setup, and even DNS/MX etc. can be automatically switched.

Recovery systems are ‘Pre-recovered’ every night on Plan B remote virtual machines (VMs) and connected to via VPN.

Whole process is automated, System recovery images are built, configured and tested to work for every snapshot (< 24 hours) and therefore Plan B Recoveries are guaranteed.

The Plan B Service provides a very fast recovery of critical IT Systems and Infrastructure (within minutes).


Different DR Services

Plan B Pre-Recovery provides a tested warm standby equivalent


Pre-recovered solutions

are ready to be simply

booted and can be

available in minutes with

secure network access

setup ready to do work

are automatically booted together

and the complete solution tested every night.

All newly

pre-recovered services

Any errors are reported for engineer investigationworking virtual images and configured

to operate without error on the Plan B Rescue platform.

Plan B’s master system configured to replicate all

dependencies and to reproduce secure network

connectivity

Updated

snapshots

are immediately built into

Incremental snapshot

data is combined with

existing snapshots to

create new updated

snapshots for each

protected server

Dedicated Plan B Appliance takes ‘snapshot’

copies of live servers. Incremental data is

minimised and encrypted and securely

transferred to Plan B’s central systems


• Snapshot daily & recreate systems and environment completely

• Automate and repeat the process• Test every complete recovery solution every night

Key Service features

We guarantee all Recoveries:

If we can’t deliver systems within twice the number of minutes they usually take to become available we will refund fees for the last 12 months

Key Service features


Plan B in Recovery

Plan B - in a disaster

• Simple phone call to invoke a recovery

• Recovery systems are immediately available

• No dependence on Engineers at time of disaster

• Connection over SSL or IPSec VPNs

• Access recovery systems within minutes from any Internet connection

• No rules on whether a customer can invoke or how long they can be on the platform.

• After the event Plan B will help you migrate back to new live systems


Our organisational security is based on ITIL and we are certified ISO27001/2 International Information Security Management Standard compliant. Our last independent external Audit carried out by the BSI was November 2013.

We operate from secure data centres that have strong physical security, strong access and authorisation controls.

Our systems are designed and architected to be inherently secure and we use encryption and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to ensure security of data in transit.

Plan B staff are vetted to BS7858 standards before being employed. We allow no exceptions to this.

Plan B Security


• Minimum IT down-time - Minimum business disruption

• Simplicity - set up, on-going protection, BCP Planning

• Very cost effective

• Guaranteed recovery within minutes

• Simple invocation process

• Puts organisations back in control rapidly

• Handle IT disaster rather than be subject to it

• Protects from operational and reputational damage

Plan B: Better protection for less

Benefits of Plan B


Plan B: Pricing Structure

Plan B Service is priced according to the number and requirements of the servers to be protected.

• One-off Setup fee associated with the number of systems and the size of the Appliance deployed. Discounts for over 3 systems.

• Monthly Service fee per server protected and data stored

• No Invocation fee for access to the platform in a disaster

• Only other fees are Extended platform use fee and test fee


Disasters do happen

Disasters do happen – SAN Failure 20th December 2013 – Financial services customer had a degraded SAN that failed completely within 8 hours. Vendor was unable to fix within guaranteed time.

Recovery systems available within 30 minutes. Users attached via VPN immediately.

The customer ran on Plan B platform for 10 days.

Despite vendor eventually fixing the SAN customer no longer trusted the HW and Plan B provided an ‘Export server’ solution as a temporary local fix.

They are still running on the export server two months later.

• Catastrophic Hardware and to a lesser degree Software failures are a common cause of IT disasters

• Plan B solution worked quickly when everything else had failed empowering company to start solving the business issues.

• Approach enabled strategic approach for return to live


Plan B: Saving businesses from real Disasters

9pm, 15th April 2013 – Fire in Electrical riser caused extensive damage to the building, total loss of electrical infrastructure and smoke damage to IT equipment.

Recovery systems available within 40 minutes & 200 users attached via VPNs next morning

The business continued to service their core customers whilst IT staff started to recover live services.

The customer ran on Plan B platform for 9 months.

They believe fire had no impact on full year resultsWatford building fire 15/04/2013

Disasters do happen – Fire

• Plan B solution worked quickly and easily providing all core communications and information systems within minutes empowering company to immediately start solving the business issues.

• Many uncertainties and problems that would have made any form of ‘rebuild’ style of recovery too slow and difficult.

• Approach enabled strategic approach for rebuild to live


• Affordable warm standby equivalent

• 100% ‘certain to work’, instant ‘complete’ recovery

• 100% Testing of recovery images

• Completely automated process

• Very Strong money back recovery Guarantee

• Certain, simple, fast service invocations

Plan B service Differences

Plan B – Best IT Disaster protection at a reasonable price


Free Trial

Resources• Disaster Recovery Best Practices• Guide to cost vs performance• Pre-recovery whitepaper• Disaster Recovery Survey Results• DR Plan Template

www.planb.co.uk@PlanB_DR

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