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.

Google’s Gmail service failed on February 28th after a software update was deployed across their infrastructure. As a result millions of users found their Gmail accounts empty, and while Google had tape backups, it still lost some e-mail after the software update introduced a bug.

In March 2010, the company promised that Google Apps customers wouldn’t need to worry about disaster striking and used e-mail as a prime example. So what happened?”Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That’s what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue,” said Ben Treynor, Google’s vice president of engineering and site reliability czar.

So despite Google splitting all cloud based data across two data centres, it was still possible for a software bug to disable the service and irrecoverably delete user data.

The lesson from this incident? - that whist cloud based systems are likely to be more resilient than most, even the best systems can fail and just because your application is in the ‘Cloud’ doesn’t mean it’s definitely safe.

Unique, guaranteed, disaster recovery service protects and fully restores IT firm’s working systems in 15 minutes – ensuring complete business continuity

Founded 21 years ago, Salmon is a highly innovative global systems integrator, with an ‘on-time, on-budget’ approach to the design, development, implementation and management of complex commerce based projects. Salmon’s services are increasingly embraced by the leading names in retail, insurance and the retail finance markets - including Swiss Re, Argos, Novae, Pets at Home, Boots and Halfords. Salmon prides itself on adding value to its customers’ day-to-day operations.

The continuity challenge

Being an IT services company, Salmon understand that a key factor in delivering good customer service is to ensure that IT systems remain uninterrupted. The company also appreciate that as well as the usual threats affecting IT operations, other incidents, such as power outages, fires or floods can prevent staff access to IT systems – and seriously damage the business.

Salmon originally employed an off-site data backup facility to provide IT systems recovery, in the event of an outage. However, restoring its systems involved a lengthy manual rebuild and recovery process - which wasn’t ideal for business continuity. This potential downtime and loss of business was not an option for Salmon’s 200 staff members, whose focus is on delivering customer projects.

After an internal IT review, Salmon’s disaster recovery (DR) approach was therefore deemed expensive, with limited capabilities. Salmon wanted the ability to bounce back almost instantly if any type of disastrous incident occurred.

This meant that the company needed a leading-edge, DR system in place that could provide near immediate access to working recovery systems, from any location. The DR service also needed to be cost-effective, simple to use and highly flexible.

Finding the perfect DR solution

Salmon had been in the process of migrating its systems, using VMware technology, to a virtual environment and liked the idea of capitalising on virtualisation for their DR. However, they also felt that outsourcing the DR capability to a specialist would provide a higher level of responsibility and be more cost effective.

Salmon reviewed a number of services and decided that Plan B offered a clear best fit for their requirements. A key factor in favour of Plan B being chosen was their extensive experience of making systems work in a new environment and their unique process that continually tests recovery systems are working and guarantees restoration in minutes – after an outage.

Plan B offered a compelling 30 day free trial involving the initial protection of three severs supporting Active Directory and Exchange systems. To set this up, Plan B’s intelligent snapshotting appliance was plugged into Salmon’s network, where it automatically takes copies of the IT systems - without any need for further IT staff assistance or disruption. The image copies are then sent securely to a Plan B data centre, where they are processed to run on their own network as fully functioning, interdependent machines.

The newly created system images (rescue images) are automatically tested by Plan B to guarantee that, in the event of a system outage, they will boot up without trouble and the critical operational systems will be quickly available for immediate use.

As part of the trial, Salmon were able to carry out a full test invocation of their recovery systems. The Exchange environment took under 15 minutes to boot up and Salmon were then able access the systems, via a VPN, and test every aspect to ensure they were fully working copies of their live servers.

Following this success, the Plan B service was expanded to protect nine of Salmon’s servers that run its critical operations including, call centre, email, file servers, HR and accounts applications.

Major benefits

Jeff Leaver, COO at Salmon said, “The Plan B system is simple to set up and requires minimal input to keep the service working. We are pleased that we now have a great DR system in place and are enjoying the peace of mind this brings. Invocation is a phone call away and Plan B’s support staff are highly experienced and very helpful.”

Salmon’s business systems are now protected by the DR service and the company has a best practice approach to ensuring comprehensive business continuity for its operations. The company is now assured that its staff can respond and recover from incidents as quickly and effectively as possible.

Leaver concluded, “Being an IT services company, technology is our business and having a best practice DR system is important for our customers, especially as it helps us deliver an excellent, consistent service. We are now confident that we have a DR system that enables us to experience business as usual - even if we experience a major IT outage. The Plan B service is fantastic - it really works, is very cost effective and represents superb value for money.”

http://www.salmon.com

100% guaranteed, disaster recovery (DR) service employed at CAFOD’s new office replaces charity’s twin site data backup operation

CAFOD is the official Catholic aid agency for England and Wales. In more than 40 countries across the world, the agency brings hope, compassion and solidarity to poor communities, standing side by side with them to end poverty and injustice.

CAFOD raises funds from the Catholic community in England and Wales, the UK government and the general public. These resources fund development programmes, which help to lift people out of poverty and improve living standards. In emergencies, the agency provides immediate, life-saving relief and stay on to help people rebuild their lives.

The DR refresh challenge

Being an international charity, CAFOD need efficient and available IT systems to support its international fund raising activities - as well as donor and partner communications. The agency was well aware of the threats that could negatively impact the smooth running of its IT operations.

To address any potential downtime, CAFOD’s original DR consisted of system replication at its two South London offices – each employing Data Domain for backup. However, in the event of a major outage affecting these sites, the restoration of the charity’s systems involved a lengthy manual rebuild and recovery process - which wasn’t ideal for business continuity.

CAFOD’s planned move to a brand new, Central London office prompted them to consider a new DR method that could operate effectively on a single site. Being a charity also meant that cost was an important factor – without compromising on quality of service. CAFOD wanted the most modern, simple to use and flexible, DR system – that could deliver near immediate access to working recovery systems – from any location.

Finding high quality DR at best price

CAFOD first talked to Plan B at a trade show and felt that the Plan B Service offered an excellent fit for their requirements. Key factors in choosing Plan B were their proven track record, almost instant systems recovery guarantee and highly competitive costs – involving a generous charity discount.

Plan B provided a free initial trial period allowing CAFOD’s IT team to assess how effectively they could replicate and protect the charity’s 12 severs, supporting critical operational systems including mail, CRM, accounts and databases.

To set this up, Plan B’s intelligent snapshotting appliance was plugged into CAFOD’s network, and set up to automatically take snapshot copies of the charity’s IT systems. The system snapshots are then securely transferred to a Plan B data centre, where they are processed and reconfigured to run in the Plan B virtual environment as fully functioning systems - with identical functionality to the live servers.

The newly created system images (rescue images) are automatically updated every night and tested by Plan B to ensure that they can always be booted immediately - in the event of a disastrous loss of CAFOD’s live systems. As a result, Plan B guarantee CAFOD’s recoveries to be available within a specific number of minutes.

Once set up, CAFOD carried out a full test invocation to evaluate the service and check the functionality of each recovery server. The Charity was able to access their systems, via a VPN, in minutes and check every server and application worked in exactly the way they expected. This protection, enabled CAFOD to confidently migrate servers to their new site – with the peace of mind that their critical services were protected by Plan B.

Key benefits

Paul Hayward, infrastructure manager at CAFOD said, “Plan B are great people to work with and have provided us with an easy to use DR system that keeps working in the background - requiring almost no management from us. Invocation is only a phone call away and Plan B’s support staff are reassuringly experienced and very helpful.”

CAFOD’s systems are now protected by the DR service that employs a best practice approach to ensuring comprehensive business continuity for its operations. The agency now can recover from incidents as quickly and effectively as possible and continue its essential charity work - without delays.

Hayward concluded, “We are confident that with Plan B on board we have a DR system that will protect our operations and ensure business continuity – if we suffer any outages. The Plan B service really works, and has a very competitive price point - making it great value for money.”

www.cafod.org.uk