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