Plan B has conducted a survey to analyse the key factors that cause major SME IT incidents - resulting in service failures. The findings reveal that human error accounted for 47% of incidents, followed by server failures at 29% and power and communications provider failure at 15%. Fire, flood or acts of God accounted for 9% of outages.

The Plan B analysis showed that many IT incidents are directly related to ‘human error’. These can include anything from placing a server under an air conditioner - that then leaks, to classic finger trouble - where operators irretrievably break a server and don’t have a backup. Other impacting factors identified included a second disk failure - after its mirror has previously failed and not been fixed, or issues, such as deployment failures or bugs in custom code.

Tim Dunger, operations director, Plan B said, “Our results show that human error causes the highest occurrence of service failures, whilst incidents like fire and flood are understandably less common, but do still occur. We also found that quite a lot of incidents, that initially appear to be related to pure hardware or software failure, actually have some form of human error behind them.

According to Plan B, power and communications failures proved to be reasonably common but are often quite short lived, and because most companies don’t have a recovery service that can get them working again very quickly, they tend to just tough them out. A key problem for companies is usually knowing how long the service is likely to be out for and then deciding when it’s worth trying to initiate a recovery process.

Dunger added, “The key message from the survey is perhaps that prolonged outages do happen and are more often caused by the every-day rather than the rarer fire, flood or acts of God. Many smaller and medium sized companies have limited IT support, so have less ability to respond quickly and effectively to an IT outage. They should therefore consider the risks of a prolonged IT outage carefully, and look to implement a fully managed disaster recovery (DR) service from a specialist provider like Plan B who guarantee to restore their systems within minutes of getting a call for help.”

About Plan B:

Plan B is a specialist IT Disaster Recovery business, based in the UK. The company provides an affordable, guaranteed, disaster recovery service that instantly restores fully working servers on Plan B’s rescue cloud of remote virtual servers. Plan B has a 100% customer satisfaction rating and a 100% recovery record.

http://www.planb.co.uk

Plan B Disaster Recovery are delighted to announce that it has just had its ISO 27001 - Information Security Management accreditation renewed for a further three years.

The renewal follows an extensive audit by the British Standards Institute that found no ‘non-conformities’ in any area of Plan B’s operation.

Tim Dunger, Plan B’s Operations Director said ‘We are delighted our 27001 accreditation has been renewed. Data and operational security are absolutely vital to our customers and therefore to Plan B, and being certified as compliant with the standard is our customer’s guarantee that their data and recovery systems are protected. We put a large amount of work into the secure operation of the business and it is great to have that recognised so comprehensively through this renewal.’

ISO/IEC 27001 is the international standard that formally specifies a management system that is intended to bring information security under explicit management control. Being a formal specification means that it mandates specific requirements. Organizations that claim to have adopted ISO/IEC 27001 can therefore be formally audited and certified compliant with the standard.

SO/IEC 27001 requires that management:

• Systematically examine the organization’s information security risks, taking account of the threats, vulnerabilities and impacts;
• Design and implement a coherent and comprehensive suite of information security controls and/or other forms of risk treatment (such as risk avoidance or risk transfer) to address those risks that are deemed unacceptable; and
• Adopt an overarching management process to ensure that the information security controls continue to meet the organization’s information security needs on an ongoing basis.

You can find out more about Plan B’s general approach to security here. If you would like to more about Plan B’s ISO 27001 accreditation or would like to discuss protecting your own servers then do contact us.

Plan B and Star provide iRed with a winning combination - 100% guaranteed disaster recovery and data centre service - replacing an unprotected, collocation provision

By 2014, 30% of midsize companies will have adopted “recovery-as-a-service” (RaaS), or “recovery-in-the-cloud” as it is also known, up from about 1 percent today, according to Gartner, Inc.

RaaS describes the managed replication of virtual machines (VMs) and production data in a service-provider’s cloud, together with the means to activate the VMs to support either recovery testing or actual recovery operations. The location of the data center equipment, the party housing the provider’s cloud equipment, and the price vary by provider.

Gartner sees the RaaS market being driven by midsize companies (with annual revenues between $150 million and $1 billion). Larger companies (with annual revenues or operating budgets of $1 billion or more) are more likely to have established recovery management facilities, infrastructures and support teams that are too complex to move fully to the cloud. Smaller businesses are less likely to have a formal strategy for managing disaster recovery.

“RaaS has been hailed as a ‘killer’ cloud app for disaster recovery, but the reality is that there has been much hype and some truth,” said John Morency, research vice president at Gartner. “Certainly, it addresses well-recognised ‘pain points’ in IT disaster recovery management, including the need for frequent recovery-readiness testing and the cost of dedicated recovery floor space and facilities.”

Gartner has identified four principal pain points that RaaS addresses:

1. Recovery testing/exercising costs — The costs of traditional recovery testing and exercising often constitute a significant portion of the annual disaster-recovery budget (sometimes as much as $100,000 or more per exercise). RaaS can reduce or even eliminate these costs.

2. Change skew — Consistency between the current state of the production data center infrastructure, applications and data, and their state at the time of the last recovery test erodes daily as a direct side effect of changes applied to support new business requirements. Although more frequent testing can reduce the scope of this problem, it cannot eliminate it. However, because VM replication facilitates change synchronisation between production and recovery data centre-based VMs, VM-specific change skew becomes much more manageable.

3. Recovery configuration startup — Many web applications and services often have complex meshed relationships and dependencies on other applications and data. It’s therefore essential to understand completely cross-application and data dependency relationships. RaaS can help reduce the complexity through the replication and recovery of application-specific and interdependent groups of VMs.

4. Testing scope — Determining what testing should take place is challenging and may require difficult trade-offs as there is never enough money to test everything frequently enough. Some businesses test only the most critical applications, skipping other systems to perform the critical tests more frequently; some lengthen the time between tests to afford bigger tests; some rotate testing among different groups of applications; and others look at where the failures occurred in prior tests and schedule the most fragile systems for the next recovery test. Ultimately, the strategy for testing should maximize the likelihood that critical workloads will be recovered on time during a real disaster. This requires judgment about what tests target the most likely errors and failure modes. Organisations are more likely to use RaaS to support more critical applications, especially those requiring short recovery times.

Among the midsize companies using RaaS at present, two camps are forming. The first is using server virtualization recovery features and SAN-based replication to deploy in-house disaster recovery solutions for some applications. The second is implementing initial pilots for the use of cloud services as an alternative to more traditional disaster recovery resources.

“For organisations that have not yet trialled RaaS, Gartner recommends commencing cloud infrastructure due diligence, especially for systems that already reside primarily outside their data centre,” said Mr. Morency. “They should then qualify system image replication and failover support and probe how the provider can support application connectivity during recovery testing. They also need to check provider operations controls for potential regulatory compliance exposure and pilot a bounded implementation of the target configuration. This will clarify the potential service benefits as well as the level of management support that the in-house IT team will still need to provide.”

Gartner analysts will explore RaaS further at the Gartner Data Center & IT Operations Summit, November 28-29 in London and the 30th Annual Gartner Data Center Conference, December 5-8 in Las Vegas.

Source - Continuity Central

Trusted shortlist of UK-based firms to provide end-to-end cloud services

London, 5th July, 2011 – Plan B, today announces that it is one of the founding members of a brand new initiative to bring clarity and trust to UK businesses looking to procure cloud services. The UK Cloud Alliance, a collective of UK-based technology firms and service providers aims to guarantee the full transformational benefits of cloud computing.

The Alliance will empower and enable UK businesses looking for new ways to answer their biggest challenges. The objective is to provide medium sized UK businesses with a collection of technology choices that can be delivered via Star’s private cloud platform and serviced by local specialists. This initiative brings together the best that cloud computing has to offer but delivered via local infrastructure and by local partners.

The 15 founding members of the UK Cloud Alliance span the breadth of enterprise IT and communications from telephony to security and from hardware migration to virtualization. Plan B and its fellow alliance members support customers by adhering to a strict Code of Conduct that provides transparency and guiding principles to guarantee the customer’s best interests, in addition to Service Level Agreements and any contractual terms. UK businesses now have clarity and confidence in their choice of cloud computing provider.

Ian Daly, director at Plan B said, “Plan B is delighted to be a founding member of the UK Cloud Alliance. Our own Disaster Recovery services and the complementary services of other members represent the best of the UK’s Cloud service offerings. The UK Cloud Alliance provides businesses with a clearer, safer route to exploit the extensive advantages that Cloud services can provide.”

Ricky Hudson, CEO of Star, commented, “We welcome Plan B to the UK Cloud Alliance. Beneath all the hype, cloud computing is very much in demand by a significant and growing proportion of medium sized UK businesses. This is about serving up UK technology to UK businesses because they like being served by local organizations that they can get to know, grow with and trust. Together, Star, Plan B and the rest of the Alliance will bring the innovation and value promised by cloud computing to the most dynamic sector of the UK economy.”

About Plan B
Plan B is an independent specialist IT Disaster Recovery business based in the UK. It provides an affordable, guaranteed disaster recovery service that delivers an instant recovery of fully working servers on Plan B’s Rescue Cloud of remote virtual servers. Plan B has a 100% customer satisfaction rating and a 100% recovery record. Utilising its own advanced technology Plan B has brought a new approach to server recovery, and is the only mid market disaster recovery service provider to automatically alter server images to run in remote virtual machines and critically it carries out 100% testing of server recovery images. Plan B recoveries are therefore instant and guaranteed to be available within a specific number of minutes. Plan B’s unique approach means it can deliver an Enterprise level of server recovery at a ground-breaking price point that brings for the first time affordable, real risk reduction within reach of small and medium sized organisations.

About Star
Star provides on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses. Utilising an advanced cloud computing platform, the company has redefined how business people use and pay for the technology that supports them. Star’s On-demand Business Services™ are easy to use and pay for and are available any time and from anywhere, removing unnecessary costs for hardware, software and on-going maintenance. Since 1995, when Star was founded, the company has been an Internet technology innovator and pioneered the system for cloud based spam and virus scanning for business emails that became MessageLabs. In the last 14 years Star has established itself as a leading IT and communications service provider of the highest pedigree looking after 3,500 UK business customers and their 500,000 users. Star has UK based data centres that sit within a network and communications capability that forms the basis of the Star Platform, from which a wide range of computing and communication services are delivered to customers. Star has over 230 employees working from offices throughout the UK, providing the highest levels of customer service and support. Star’s technology roadmap will deliver on-demand, cloud computing services to UK businesses who want immediate access to the latest enterprise technologies.
http://www.planb.co.uk
UK Cloud Alliance Press contacts
Paul Maher/Emma Naylor
Positive Marketing
Mobile +44 (0) 7900 600013
Direct +44 (0) 20 8237 1104/0208 237 1107
pmaher@postivemarketing.org

Plan B were runners up for this years Business Continuity Awards ‘Specialist business continuity and disaster recovery company of the year’. Given the progress we have made over the last year - customer base up by 250% and increased and revenues up by 226%, whilst keeping a 100% customer satisfaction record and the unique nature of the Plan B service we thought we were in with a good chance. Sadly, it was not to be and we were runners up to an American company, Proteus-on-Demand Facilities, that specialise in provision of temporary buildings.

Congratulations to Proteus. We were very disappointed not to win but perhaps we will get another nomination another year.

Businesses lose an average of 545 working hours a year due to IT downtime, according to a survey.

A survey of 2,000 organisations in North America and Europe, including 200 CIOs and senior IT managers, conducted by research firm Coleman Parkes on behalf of CA Technologies, finds businesses collectively lose more than 127 million man-hours a year across the US and Europe due to IT system outages, time spent on system restoration, data recovery measures and reduced employee productivity.

Zachary Slavin, IT director at brokerage firm Sobel Affiliates, said one hour of IT downtime results in a loss of 80 man-hours of work and over £1,800 in costs.

“Each business suffers an average of 14 hours of downtime a year, during which employees are only able to work at 63% of their usual productivity,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice-president of product management at CA Technologies.

Once the IT systems are back up and running, CA claims organisations lose an average of nine additional hours a year to recover data, while employee productivity levels only increase to 70%.

Half of organisations said IT outages damage the company’s reputation. A total of 87% of IT directors said an inability to recover data would damage business further.

“Given that these outages are a fact of life, and that some of the consequences of outages can be irreversible, investment in improved business continuity is extremely worthwhile,” said Fairbanks.