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BUSINESS Continuity Planning

Considerations for Business Continuity

1. Asset Identification & classification

It is very important for the organization to identify and value its assets. Not all the assets are critical to business operations. In the event of a disaster, the available resources should be directed towards ensuring the safety of assets that are most valuable

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2. Risk Analysis and Management

All the potential risks along with their impact on the business need to be analyzed. There must be a mitigation strategy that identifies the potential threats and puts appropriate controls in place to reduce the vulnerabilities. The organization needs to define the "acceptable risk" it is prepared to take.

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3. Emergency Response Mechanism

There must be a plan and detailed procedures in place to respond in cases of emergencies. Responsibilities, resources and process must be defined in detail and communicated. Pre and Post disaster activities must be clearly identified and addressed.

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4. Communication & Review

The business continuity plans have to be shared with all the stakeholders, including employees and partners, to be effective. There must also be periodic reviews to align the plans with changing business needs and objectives.

Main considerations for designing DR

  • How valuable is the data?

  • Scope of Outage

  • Technical Vs Business & Financial needs

  • Cost Vs Expense

  • Types of Solutions

How valuable is the data?

Questions to be asked from Ourselves ??

  • Is data loss acceptable ?

  • What is the impact of lost data ?

  • How much time can be lost before it becomes an impact on business ?

  • 5 Minutes, 1 Hour or 24 Hours ?

  • Can data be easily or quickly recovered ?

  • What are the sources of your data ?

  • Can it be re-entered or re-loaded ?

Scope of Outage

Questions to be asked from Ourselves ??

  • 1 hour or less

    • Reboot​

    • Disk Failure

    • Space Issue

    • Power surge or outage

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  • 1 to 24 hours

    • Minor hardware failure

    • Data corruption

    • Database recovery

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  • More than 1 day …

    • Major hardware failure (RAC / SAN)

    • Catastrophic issues

      • Fire, Flood, Tornado, Earthquake, ….​

      • Building and hardware no longer exist

Types of Solutions

Questions to be asked from Ourselves ??

  • Backup on disk

    • Cheap and fast

    • Old fashioned Cold backup – shutdown database and copy to disk

    • Database export with database up and active (point in time recovery)

    • RMAN level 0 and level 1 backup

    • Can provide a reasonable amount of security

    • Could be lost with hardware failure

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  • Tape backup

    • Cheap and dependable

      • second level of backups used with a backup to disk​

      • Can keep multiple copies and can be stored off site

      • Slower to recover than disk, but not affected by hardware failure

    • Expenses

      • Tape drives

      • Tapes

      • Software

      • Continuing cost of replacing tapes

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  • Full redundant system

    • Expensive!

      • Virtually no down time​

      • Very reliable and Fastest form of backup and recovery

    • Expenses

      • Duplicate Servers

      • Storage

      • Licenses

      • Secondary location

      • Dedicated lines connecting sites

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DR Options

  • Near Site DR

  • Remote site DR

  • Managed Services by Service Provider

  • Leased model of hardware ownership

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