To Give Your Best You Should Be Prepared for the Worst - Assignment Example

To give your best you should be prepared for the worst’ Interview with an ICT Manager Section Number of ‘To give your best you should be prepared for the worst’ Mr Alex Gottard is the General Manager, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) of Travelways Inc. a travel and holiday organizing company. Travelways Inc. organizes national and international holidays, tours and travels for its clients. It books passages on airlines, trains and ships, arranges accommodation and organizes safaris, sight-seeing tours and events. It has tie-ups with major airlines, cruise agencies, hotel chains and other travel agencies. Mr Gottard is 36 years of age. He took his degrees in computer science and networking and initially started his career as a data centre operator. He gained working experience in server administration, and simultaneously specialized in network storage technologies by taking a certified course. His combination of skill, knowledge and experience saw him rise very fast up the corporate ladder. He now leads the ICT department of Travelways Inc. and takes a special interest in ensuring that there is no disruption to the ICT support his team provides to the organization. List of questions 1. To what extent doe s the functioning of your company depend on your department? 2. What happens in the event of a breakdown in the services of your department? 3. What if the building burns down? Disasters do happen. Do you have any business continuity or disaster recovery plans? 4. Do you mean to say that Disaster Recovery Planning can be done independent of Business Continuity Planning? 5. How exactly do you define a Disaster Recovery Plan? 6. What are the possible disasters that you take into consideration in your Disaster Recovery Plan? 7. Is your disaster recovery plan a written document? How do you acquaint all personnel concerned with the plan? 8. How does your plan work? What would you do, say for example, if you lost your entire database? How would you or could you function? 9. Have you developed this remote data mirroring solution yourself? 10. How is your company management involved in the disaster recovery plan? 11. If there were no resource and time constraints, would you have gone for a more extensive and elaborate disaster recovery plan? 12. What are the various phases of development of a disaster recovery plan? 13. How often is your contingency plan tested? 14. Are the results of the contingency test runs audited by anyone in the organization? Responses 1. Travelways Inc. is a travel and holiday organizer. Every aspect of its functioning right from the initial stage when a prospective client makes an enquiry is dependent on ICT. Clients access our servers for all information they require at all stages of their travel and holiday. We use the Internet to make contact with airlines, railways, shipping corporations, hotels and tour operators all over the world to book passages and make reservations. The very business of Travelways Inc. can be termed a ICT business. Its ICT department is the most crucial department. 2. A long-duration breakdown is unthinkable. Anything longer a few minutes would result in absolute chaos. It would be an unmitigated disaster. 3. Yes, some disasters are unavoidable in spite of all precautions. Of course, we have a disaster recovery plan integrated with out business continuity. I would like to distinguish between the two. The Disaster Recovery Plan or the DRP is usually specifically concerned with the restarting of a crucial set of ICT systems and infrastructure components. The process of Business Continuity Planning or BCP, on the other hand, is concerned with the enterprise as a whole, and deals with business functions rather than application systems. What however needs to be understood is that Disaster Recovery is a core component of any Business Continuity effort with many overlapping areas. They address the same basic problem. 4. Yes, many companies first build a working DRP before taking the next logical and inevitable step and developing an overall BCP. If the relation between the two processes is understood well enough, then knowledge gained in one area can be leveraged in the other. In our case, we preferred to integrate the two, it provides a more holistic and more effective approach. 5. The ideal Disaster Recovery Plan should cover both the hardware and software that run critical business applications. The plan details the associated processes to transition smoothly in the event of a natural or human-made disaster. The Disaster Recovery Plan is based on a full assessment of the mission-critical businesses processes and associated applications and ICT infrastructure. The key to an effective DRP is defining ‘recovery’. From an ICT perspective this would mean establishing support for the processing and communications functions, and then establishing support for ancillary systems. From the perspective of the business recovery will imply being able to execute the business functions that are at the core of the business, and then being able to execute ancillary functions. The DRP objectives supplement the business recovery objectives. In our case it is vital to keep our servers functional with the latest possible databases in place. The web servers and the databases linked to them have been given the highest priority so that our clients and business partners feel the impact of the disaster and the resultant disruption in services for the least period of time. Our DRP stipulates recovery timeframes for each major component and function according to their order of importance. We believe in being prepared for the worst to give our best. 6. Our Disaster Recovery Plan is based on assessment of the impact, technical, physical and financial, that a number of disasters could have on our ICT infrastructure and company. We have taken into consideration possible disasters such as fire, storm, water, total power failure, war, terrorist attacks and other crimes, and extreme cold weather. For each of these, we have analyzed how much of our ICT infrastructure could be compromised, what would be the total cost, what effort would be required to rebuild, how long it would take to recover, what would be the overall impact on the organization, how the customers would be affected and the impact on the share price and market confidence. 7. Yes, of course, our disaster recovery plan is documented in detail. The document is updated as the plan is updated periodically. We make it a point to acquaint all personnel concerned with the plan through the document through various validation checks, tests and training programs. 8. Yes, a good disaster recovery plan has to address such worst-case scenarios. What if we lost our entire database? Well, we would still function and in a matter of minutes, with almost no data lag. How do we do that? We have built a disaster recovery facility at another geographical location. When we were developing our disaster recovery plan, we were looking for a quick way of recovering data in the event of a disaster. We did not consider restoring data from tapes as a good enough solution because of the length of time it would take to get the tapes from the off-site storage and the amount of time it would again take to restore data from the tapes to the servers. We wanted a wanted a reliable and simple-to-use disaster recovery solution for data access at a low cost. We found a remote storage mirroring solution that provides host-based, real-time continuous replication to our disaster recovery site far away from our product servers over standard IP networks. This mirroring process uses continuous, asynchronous, byte-level replication and captures the changes as they occur. It copies only changed bytes, therefore reducing network use, enabling quicker replication and reducing latency to a great extent. This remote mirroring solution integrates with our existing backup solutions, and can replicate data to perform remote backups and can take snapshots at any time without having any impact on our production severs. It replicates over our available IP network, both in LAN and WAN, and has been deployed without any additional cost. This remote mirroring solution accords us the maximum possible against data loss from failures and other disasters. 9. No, it is a solution available in the market, but we procured modification rights and customized the package for our own requirements. 10. The first and most important step in developing a successful disaster recovery plan is to create management awareness. The top-level management will allocate necessary resources and time required from various areas of the organizations only if they understand, realize and support the value of disaster recovery. The management has to also accord approval for final implementation of the plan. 11. No, considering our requirements, I think we have the most optimal disaster recovery plan in place that integrates seamlessly with our business continuity plan. I say this because we accord the utmost priority to disaster recovery, and have allocated whatever was required in terms of resources and time for the development of a optimal disaster recovery plan. 12. Development of a Disaster Recovery Plan involves distinct steps or phases. It starts with the initiation phase in which the effort is concentrated on gaining an understanding of the existing and planned future ICT environment of the organization, define the scope of the project, chalk out the project schedule, and identify risks to the project. This is followed by assessment of disaster risk, business impact analysis, definition of requirements, project planning, project execution, BCP integration, validation and verification and finally maintenance and ongoing integration. Our workflow for managing disaster recovery is represented diagrammatically. 13. We run a quarterly test of crucial components of our contingency plan. 14. The results are audited by a specifically designated disaster recovery core team which is also entrusted with the responsibility of keeping the plan updated. This is because disaster recovery is essential not only to cope with the eventuality of disaster but also to ensure that our company is in compliance with fast-changing regulatory requirements and is prepared to meet the demands of a changing market place. Workflow for managing disaster recovery Read More