Disaster Recovery Journal

SunGard Availability Services
Consulting Introduces New Practice
and Focus on Operational Resilience

WAYNE, Pa. — SunGard Availability Services has announced the refocusing of its consulting organization to improve the resilience of its clients’ operations. SunGard Consulting helps organizations build the most effective strategy for managing operational risk while ensuring availability through innovative business continuity strategies, enabling technologies such as cloud computing, and improving efficiencies through high-performing IT operating models.

The SunGard Consulting practice leverages a combination of proprietary and industry best practices and tools to better assess, prioritize and manage controls for operational risks. The practice utilizes SunGard’s new proprietary Risk, Resilience and Recovery (R3) framework methodology and quan-tifiably measures risk by leveraging software tools such as the RiskView Business Risk Analytics™ solution from Rev2®.

SunGard has also established a partnership with The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute to use their Resilience Management Model CERT-RMM, a management model for operational resilience.

SunGard uses Rev2’s patent-pending RiskView Business Risk Analytics solution to help reduce the client’s organizational risk profile. RiskView provides the ability to identify, compare and quantify vulnerabilities across an entire enterprise before they impact business performance. RiskView identifies the materiality of risks according to their potential impact on business performance, helping clients to prioritize and schedule business process improvement, problem resolution and overall spending.

To learn more, visit www.sungardas.com.

White Paper Release: Our Path to Business Continuity Certification

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Avalution Consulting, a leader in business continuity, continuity of operations planning (COOP) and IT disaster recovery consulting, outsourcing and software solutions, announced the release of their latest white paper, Our Path to Business Continuity Certification, co-authored by Stacy Gardner (MBCI), managing consultant, and Christopher Burton (AMBCI), senior consultant.

Certification to any standard – not just business continuity-related standards – can prove to be a time and resource-intensive effort that can result in questions, concerns and skepticism from stakeholders throughout an organization. Similar to any initiative with an organization-wide impact, certification requires management commitment and support, a strong business case, personnel time, and financial resources in order to achieve success and deliver long-term value, so it’s important to research up front whether certification makes business sense for and would be successful within your organization.

This white paper identifies methods that can help an organization assess the benefits of certification using first-hand internal experiences, as well our experience in helping other organizations successfully achieve BS 25999-2 certification. The white paper offers a chronological narrative that clarifies the general certification process and provides “tips and tricks” for a successful business continuity management system implementation and certification.

Windstream Hosted Solutions
Introduces Disaster Recovery as a
Service

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Businesses of all sizes today report an increased need for enhanced disaster recovery plans that offer swift and proven recovery when a disaster strikes. To meet that demand, Windstream Hosted Solutions has announced its new Disaster Recovery as a Service solution — combining the best of replication and cloud technologies, and offering a fully hosted and managed disaster recovery solution.

Capitalizing on Windstream’s existing cloud infrastructure footprint, the Windstream Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution provides a variety of cost-effective methods to replicate and recover critical servers and data center infrastructure. By simplifying the disaster recovery process to speed recovery time, Windstream’s Disaster Recovery as a Service recovers a customer’s infrastructure and runs it in the cloud.

By taking advantage of the economies of scale of cloud infrastructure, Windstream’s solution delivers recovery times suited for mission-critical applications at a previously unachievable cost. At the same time, leveraging Windstream’s data center hosting expertise allows customers to outsource both the architectural design and testing of their disaster recovery service.

According to a 2011 Forrester Research survey
of data center decision makers, about two-thirds of
those surveyed said they “considered disaster recov-
ery to be of high or critical importance in the decision
to adopt cloud services.”
For more information, visit www.windstream.
com.

Survey Shows NAS Optimization as
Top Choice for Overcoming Storage
Performance Challenges

PITTSBURGH, Penn. — Avere Systems has announced the results of a third-party survey that shows NAS Optimization as the top choice of solutions being considered by IT executives to meet the challenges to storage performance posed by virtualization.

In the first half of 2012, Gatepoint Research invited more than 1,000 selected executives to participate in the “Impact of Virtualization on Storage Performance Optimization Trends” Pulse Report survey. Seventy percent of responders were employed by companies with annual revenues of at least $1.5 billion, forty-five percent work at director level or above with 23 percent at the VP or CxO level and 41 percent manage more than 500 TBs of storage capacity.

The survey asked what solutions they were considering implementing into their company’s virtualization strategy to help overcome the needs of high-performance applications on their storage networks. NAS Optimization was at the top of the list of respondents’ choices for meeting the storage challenges posed by virtualization ( 26 percent) with NAS controller upgrades also at 26 percent. The least popular options considered were read-only caching (5%) and short-stroking hard drives (3%).

More than half of respondents will achieve 50
percent server virtualization by 2014, with 35% of
organizations expecting to have more than two-thirds
of servers virtualized in the same time period. In
regards to desktop virtualization or VDI plans, less
than one-fifth of the organizations surveyed expect to
have 50 percent or more of their desktops virtualized
by 2014, reflecting a lower VDI penetration rate in
comparison to server virtualization.

FEMA Urges Preparedness For Hurricanes And Severe Weather

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hurricane Season began June 1, 2012. FEMA is providing additional tools for federal, state, local, tribal and territorial officials to alert and warn the public about severe weather. Using the Commercial Mobile Alert System, or CMAS, which is a part of FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, this structure will be used to deliver Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) to wireless carriers for distribution to the public.

The CMAS system will allow the National Weather Service to soon begin issuing WEAs for the most dangerous weather through participating wireless carriers directly to cell phones. The alerts will be broadcast by cell towers much like an AM/FM radio station, and cell phones within range will immediately pick up the signal, provided they are capable of receiving these alerts. The availability of WEA alerts will be dependent on the network status of the wireless carriers and handset availability, since not all cell phones can receive WEAs. People should check with their cellular carriers to see if WEA alerts are available in their area.

WEAs will look like a text message, and will automatically appear on the mobile device screen showing the type and time of alert along with any action that should be taken. The message will be no more than 90 characters, and will have a unique tone and vibration, indicating a WEA has been received. If an alert is received, citizens should follow the instructions and seek additional information from radio, television, NOAA Weather Radio, and other official sources for emergency information. Citizens should only call 911 in a life-threat-ening situation.

Only authorized federal, state, local, tribal or territorial officials can send WEA alerts to the public. As with all new cellular services, it will take time for upgrades in infrastructure, coverage, and handset technology to allow WEA alerts to reach all cellular customers.

FEMA urges individuals and businesses to take action to prepare themselves in advance of severe weather and hurricanes such as taking the pledge to prepare at www.ready.gov/pledge. This is the first step in making sure you and your family are ready for an emergency. This includes filling out your family communications plan that you can email to yourself, assembling an emergency kit, keeping important papers and valuables in a safe place, and getting involved.

With the start of hurricanes season it is even more important to know your risk, take action, and be an example. While hurricanes often offer some warning that a threat is approaching, severe weather can occur at anytime and in any place, including high winds, inland flooding, severe storms and tornadoes.