Disaster Recovery, BCP and Cloud

Few days back I blogged about the spirit with which BCP or DR should be planned. Continuing on that here are two recent whitepapers published by Amazon and Microsoft on utilizing cloud as DR environment.

Amazon

This paper talks about how Amazon’s AWS can be used as a DR environment and how various AWS services can play role in that including S3 and EC2.

It also includes backup and restore.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/10/new-whitepaper-use-aws-for-disaster-recovery.html

Microsoft

Microsoft’s paper takes more holistic approach which includes how Windows Phone can participate in an event of DR.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Outlines-Disaster-Preparedness-Strategy-for-SMBs-232210.shtml

Business Continuity Planning or Disaster Recovery–The ‘Deep Impact’ way

The other day I was watching the ‘Deep Impact’ movie and realized that there is so much to learn for Enterprise Architects from it in the area of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) or Disaster Recovery (DR).

Just to mention here, BCP is a very broad term which influences both business and IT. While DR is mostly used by IT and refers to bringing the IT systems back after natural disaster or catastrophe failure.

The two most important lessons learnt are:

1. Diversity – For enterprise to run normal at some capacity, most important systems of every business function needs to be running.

2. Dependency – The interdependency amongst systems should be known and should be used while planning the recovery.

So while preparing your DR plan, it is important that you do not plan for ‘all systems need to be brought up as soon as possible’ kind of stuff. Instead in conjunction with business, have the priority of systems clearly identified so that you can sequence the recovery while keeping in mind the interdependencies of systems.

Also make sure you do not have circular dependencies amongst your systems.