The Six
‘Gotchas’ of
Disaster Recovery
By PHILIP LIEBERMAN
It is no surprise that disaster preparation is top of mind among people these days. The images and stories coming out of Japan following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the country inevitably lead to people wondering, “What would I do if the earth moved or water flooded my state, city,
or neighborhood?”
From a business perspective, much of disaster planning
revolves around all-important data back-up and recovery pro-
cesses. Whether a disruption is the result of a cataclysmic event
or a hardware malfunction, real business continuity cannot be
maintained in this digital age without off-site backup. But off-site
data backups are no magic solution for disaster recovery. There’s
a lot more to the story.
There are many factors that can snag the recovery process if
businesses aren’t careful. Here are six of the biggest issues organizations may face as they plan for continuity.
Back-Up Activation Keys and Licensing
Application data isn’t much good if your company has not
backed up the activation keys and licensing necessary to restore
its software licenses. Many organizations forget how important it
is to keep duplicates of the activation and licensing information
in safe and redundant locations to ensure a quick recovery after
a disruption.
Securely Store Encryption Keys
Similarly, encrypted back-up tapes are about as useful as doorstops when an organization loses its encryption key information.
Recent public-sector data breaches have proven that organizations cannot get by with keeping back-up data unencrypted. This
makes it is critical for you to plan and execute a key management
strategy; you’ll need to think about how keys will be stored and
recovered to assure a smooth data recovery process.
Account for Application Customizations
Many organizations will spend millions of dollars on consulting fees to create customized modules and settings for enterprise
software only to see it all go up in smoke following a disaster
event. A big mistake businesses often make is to back up all of the
appropriate application data but forget about duplicating custom-ization information. Remembering to fill this gap ahead of time
can not only save money, but also prevent prolonged business
disruption following an incident.
What If the Super User is Incapacitated
The saga of Terry Childs, the former San Francisco city network administrator who refused to divulge key infrastructure
passwords to his bosses, should teach all organizations the lesson
that it is never wise to entrust all of your critical account login
information to one superuser. This is a single point of failure in
privileged identity that can be particularly painful if an individual
who keeps critical login information in his or her head passes
away. Childs eventually saw the light after some jail time, but if
the keeper of your organization’s password secrets is no longer
alive, intimidation won’t solve your problem. This scenario highlights the importance of distributed, fault-tolerant processes and
tools that allow you to replicate accounts. Doing so will give
your organization the peace of mind that it can recover systems
and accounts in the event of a major catastrophe or if key staff
become incapacitated (or simply out of reach).
Don’t Let VMs Prevent Partial Recovery
The fact that most back-up and recovery operations are “all
or nothing” propositions didn’t pose much of a problem a few
short years ago. But the wide-scale adoption of virtualization
has thrown a wrinkle in many disaster recovery plans. During
the triage stage that often follows a disruption, organizations may
need to immediately recover only a piece of the infrastructure
such as one critical virtualized server that handles e-mail messaging. But the nature of VMs makes it impossible to restore one
machine without many others. As organizations think about business continuity, they really need to plan for partial recovery of the
most critical business services first.
The Cloud Can’t Save You
Disaster recovery is often at the top of the laundry list of benefits being touted these days. True, the flexibility and resiliency
of the cloud can promote continuity for data contained within
that architecture. But that’s the big catch. Much of your data is
not contained in the cloud and never will move there. In fact,
if your organization faces any of today’s prevailing regulatory
compliance mandates, it is likely that your most sensitive data
will remain in-house. So, any but the smallest organization that
pins its disaster recovery hopes on the cloud may need to rethink
those assumptions.
When laying out their disaster recovery plans, organizations
should repeatedly seek out their worst-case scenarios. They
should be testing their recovery efforts. Businesses often struggle
with recovering from a disaster, because they’ve never actually
practiced the procedures they’ve planned. Resource limitations
and fear of downtime often keep organizations from achieving
the ideal full recovery simulations, but at the very least organizations should perform repeat, limited recovery testing.
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As;president;and;founder;of;Lieberman;Software,;Philip;Lieberman;devel-oped the first products for the privileged password management and
shared;account;password;management;space;and;continues;to;introduce
new;solutions;to;resolve;the;security;threat;of;common;local;account;cre-dentials.;He;is;the;chief;blogger;at;Identity;Week;www.identityweek.com.
