One in three mid-sized companies in the UK does not have a disaster recovery plan in place for their website, according to recent research commissioned by managed hosting services provider NetBenefit.

With nearly three quarters of mid-sized UK companies now doing business online, the researchers argued that this represents a serious threat to online business continuity.

NetBenefit discovered that 67 per cent of companies have plans in place to guard against threats such as viruses, DoS attacks or unpredicted spikes in traffic, but only 38 per cent test their plans more than once a year.

The research also revealed that many mid-sized companies are underestimating the effect of downtime. Some 64 per cent of respondents anticipate ‘no damage’ or only ’slight damage’ to their business if their website went down for a whole day.

The study was conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne among 100 UK IT directors representing companies with 250 or more employees.

NetBenefit said that the results highlight the risks companies are taking by failing to ensure a continuous service in the event of website failure.

Jonathan Robinson, chief operating officer at NetBenefit, said: “We know that the number of mid-market companies using the internet as a business channel continues to grow, but we have been very surprised by the lack of disaster recovery planning.
“Nearly every day we hear about viruses, hacking and other web attacks, let alone natural disasters such as fires or floods.

“While many companies go to great lengths to protect their physical assets with burglar alarms and other security devices, they do little or nothing to protect their vital online business.”

Plan B’s managed Disaster Recovery service has been shortlisted for this year’s Business Continuity Awards in the ‘Most Innovative Solution of the Year’ category.

The Business Continuity Awards recognise excellence within the field of business continuity and operational risk management. They will be presented in the Great Room at Grosvenor House on Wednesday 27 May 2009.

Tim Dunger of Plan B Commented ‘We are delighted to have been shortlisted and for Plan B’s service to be recognised in this way so soon after being launched. It’s a real endorsement of the service and the value we believe it brings to companies keen to protect their business in a simple, effective and inexpensive way.’

Bob Tarzey, in Computer Weekly 24/3/09, writes:

Plan B Disaster Recovery lowers the cost of business continuity

Author: Bob Tarzey
Posted: 10:37 24 Mar 2009
Topics: Business Continuity

Most users must have had one of those bad PC days, when you arrive at work enthused to complete a task, only to end up spending the day waiting for IT to fix your newly broken PC, or in a small business often doing it yourself.

When this happens at the server level, many users are impacted, and it can be expected to happen at the most inconvenient time, such as the end of a month, quarter or year.

Most managers are aware of the reliance their business has on IT and the impact of applications not being available, but although they may not like to admit it, many have only crossed fingers as a business continuity plan.

Basically they are hoping that the inevitable does not happen any time soon, and this is especially likely to be true for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). There are a number of ways of mitigating the risk of such server failure.

Mitigate against server failure

One is to have a second server on hot or cold stand-by. This is expensive, at least doubling the cost of the initial investment in hardware and software, and unless the standby server is at a separate location, it does not protect against fire and flood.

A second is to engage a managed service provider (MSP) to host and manage servers; they then take on the task of providing a given level of availability.

For those with existing in-house systems, using an MSP might be a future consideration, but may not be practical for providing a business continuity plan in the short term.

And, anyway, MSPs are not immune from hardware failure, although they are more likely to spot emerging problems before they happen and to have the spare parts at hand to get systems up and running again quickly.

A third way is to use a service offered by a new company called Plan B Disaster Recovery (Plan B DR). It can put server level disaster recovery in place almost overnight.

Plan B DR does just what it says on the box: for a fee of about £180 per month per server it will keep images of your servers off-site at its datacentre ready to fire up if a disaster should happen.

The process is straightforward. Once you have signed up Plan B DR sends you an appliance which you plug into your network. A one time password allows you to browse to the appliance and identify target servers to which the appliance downloads an agent.

Outwardly the appliance can only communicate with Plan B DR, which uses it to create daily images of your servers and storage volumes associated with them.

Obviously this means you may lose up to 24 hours worth of data depending on when your server fails, but that is no different to the situation with normal daily backups. Basic server configurations do not change that often, but can be frustratingly hard to rebuild if no record has been kept of how that server had been built, possibly a number of years back.

Plan B DR allows, and recommends, that its service is tested on a regular basis, so when it comes to the crunch and the service needs to be invoked in anger there are no hiccups. When this does happen users are simply redirected via a virtual private network (VPN) link to a virtual server image running on Plan B DR’s infrastructure.

Virtual server

The provision of the virtual server is covered by the subscription for a few weeks until the old server is fixed or a new one found, at which point the server image can be reloaded in its current state by Plan B DR. The replacement could even be at the premises of an MSP if such a disaster provokes a rethink about how IT is managed in the first place.

Plan B DR has been up and running for four months. So far it supports only Microsoft servers, although it has plans for Linux. But as its target market is SMBs, where many servers are Microsoft-based, it has had plenty of interest and it has already signed up to 20 customers.

So far only one has required the service to be invoked for real (although a test invocation of every server image is carried out on a daily basis). Plan B DR sells the service direct or via resellers and it is considering working with overseas partners that could set up their own service with an agreement to use Plan B DR’s appliance.

Does Plan B DR have a Plan B? Of course: its main infrastructure is hosted by an MSP at a datacentre in Maidenhead UK. Its backup systems are in its own offices in Theale near Reading.

If, at the back of your mind you know that your business is vulnerable to a bad server day, maybe it is time to think about this type of a service, rather than investing in a back-up datacentre.

Plan B are delighted to announce that BSI auditors have passed the organisation as meeting the requirements of the international Information Security Management Standard ISO27001:2005.

Tim Dunger, Plan B’s Operations Director said, “We are delighted that our security management structures and processes have been ISO27001 certified. We take our customers’ and our own information security very seriously and it is great to have this endorsement of our processes, people and technology.’

Plan B are the only provider of a virtualised disaster recovery service to be ISO27001 certified.

Computer Weekly yesterday reported that:

Networks were still unavailable today, nearly two days after a virus caused a “major incident” at Barts and The London NHS Trust.

Computer Weekly has learned that the virus caused a plethora of spurious messages to overload the trust’s network.

The trust, which has installed the “Cerner” Care Records Service under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT], diverted ambulances to neighbouring hospitals for several hours while IT specialists shut down the networks and tried to find out how the virus penetrated them.

The virus was discovered on Monday afternoon. By this morning there was still only limited access to the trust’s networks.

A spokesman for Barts said today that parts of the network are being brought up gradually. He said it was still not known how the virus got into the networks. It affected networks at the trust’s three main hospitals: St Bartholomew’s in the City, the Royal London in Whitechapel and the London Chest in Bethnal Green.

Barts has England’s biggest centre for treating heart attacks, and also has specialist treatments for cancer. It is one of the capital’s leading trauma and emergency care centres, and is home to London’s air ambulance.

Ambulance services to the trust were diverted during the outbreak but early evening yesterday the trust began taking in ambulances again.

Hospital officials were telling the media, on the basis of their guidance notes, that the Care Records Service - part of the £12.7bn National Programme for IT - was working normally. They said the Care Records Service was unaffected by the virus.

But one official at Barts conceded that, with the network overloaded because of the virus, staff “might” have been unable to access the Care Records Service. He said that in that event staff would have reverted to accessing paper-based records.

Although this is a normal backup procedure it can cause backlogs of work and reduce the number of patients that staff and clinicians can see and treat.

The Care Records Service allows access to patient records. The hospital’s networks also handled requests for X-rays.

In a statement yesterday the trust said, “The Trust’s well rehearsed emergency procedures have been activated to ensure that key clinical systems continue while network access is being established.

“We have maintained a safe environment for our patients throughout the incident. Manual backup systems are in use and we are in the process of restoring the computer systems with priority being given to the most important areas for maintaining patients services.

“Operating theatres and outpatients departments have remained operational throughout the incident, though some non-essential activities have been scaled back. A&E remains open to walk-in patients and ambulances are being diverted to neighbouring hospitals in the short term.”

Julian Nettel, chief executive at the trust, said yesterday, “This has been a difficult day, but by using back-up systems, manual procedures and working flexibly, we have continued to provide high quality care to our patients.”

The trust says that medical staff have been able to make paper-based requests for laboratory tests and X-rays. Nettel said, “I would particularly like to thank all our staff, patients and other NHS colleagues for their hard work, help and support during this incident.”

Plan B DR has announced a file backup enhancement to its mananged disaster recovery service.

With this lastest version of the Plan B DR service, customers can now use the snapshot data held locally on their Plan B appliance as a fast and simple file backup. If customers want to recover a lost or deleted file, they can now simply locate it on their appliance using the appliance portal to retrieve it.

We’ve also got one very large advantage over most existing backup
solutions. Because the rescue images are tested daily, the back up files are too. So you can be completely confident that your backup files will be there and work when you need them too!

More.

Plan B DR have passed the pre assessment for ISO/IEC 27001:2005 security standard with no non-conformities.

Ian Daly, Head of Compliance at Plan B DR, commented that the company was committed to its security certification to drive quality and operational resilience throughout the business.

For more information please contact:

Tim Dunger
Plan B Disaster Recovery Plc

Tel. (+44) 0118 902 6964
Email. info@planbdr.co.uk

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Plan B have recently opened a new Rescue Platform silo at a brand new data centre near Maidenhead in Berkshire. Commenting on the announcement; Tim Dunger, Plan B plc’s Operations Director said ‘We are absolutely delighted to open this new Plan B facility. It uses the latest virtualisation technology, the resilient infrastructure of the new data centre, and a very cost effective and resilient fibre network that is independent of the normal utility fibre ducts and London. We expect this will provide significant benefit for our Customers.

For more information please contact:

Tim Dunger
Plan B Disaster Recovery Plc

Tel. (+44) 0118 902 6964
Email. info@planbdr.co.uk

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