Forex - MoneyShow.com

Eric Burgener
Market Forces Driving Change
The conventional approach to DR was to periodically
ship copies of backup tapes to remote locations, where
they were often stored for years, to ensure data
recovery in the event of catastrophic disasters which
may shut down primary sites. In the world of DR,
two key metrics govern recovery capabilities: recovery
point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective
(RTO). RPO defines the minimum acceptable level
of data loss (e.g. no more than 24 hours, no more
than 4 hours, etc.) per recovery event, while RTO
defines the maximum acceptable time to recovery
(e.g. data and/or applications restored and running
within 8 hours, etc.).
Remote recoveries from tape generally exhibit lax
RPO and RTO. By the time tapes are stored at
a remote location, the data may already be
several days to a week old, and recovery can
easily require several days to a week. Data is
growing at unprecedented rates, and evolving
business and regulatory mandates are driving
ever more stringent recovery requirements.
For most critical application environments,
a tape-based DR approach just can’t meet
these requirements, putting businesses at
risk for lost revenue, poor customer service,
and, in certain extreme cases, overall
business viability. These market forces
are driving many FX brokers to reevaluate
how they plan for DR.
>>>
Planning for Effective DR
There are four critical planning steps that FX brokers
must take in either setting up a DR plan for the first
time or re-evaluating their pre-existing plans:
Step 1: Understand business priorities
While FX brokers have a number of business
processes, certain ones are more critical than others.
Generally, any business processes that are directly
related to revenue generation or customer support are
deemed critical. To focus in on areas for which a
recovery plan must truly exist, it helps to: 1)
understand the time-sensitivity of recovery and how it
relates to business priorities; and 2) identify the
impacts of failures, quantifying them in terms of
dollar amounts (e.g. revenue lost per hour, etc.) where
possible. Create a prioritized list that includes all
major business process areas, and then map those
business processes to the relevant supporting IT
infrastructure. The end goal of this exercise is to have
a list of applications, servers, and storage that must be
available to support each business process.
Step 2: Assess your recovery requirements
Once major business process areas have been
prioritized in terms of their criticality to the business,
you will know which ones need to be focused on first.
The next step is to determine the business impact of
longer versus shorter recovery times for these key
business processes. Recovery tiering is an approach
that is often used when evaluating the recovery
requirements associated with various business
processes. Instead of evaluating and setting recovery
requirements individually for all major business
process areas, a small number of recovery tiers is
defined. Each tier has a set of recovery performance
metrics (e.g. RPO, RTO) that are associated with all
application environments within that tier. For
example, you may define three tiers: the highest tier
for your most critical business processes without
which you cannot run your business, a middle tier for
applications that are not critical but still important,
and a lower tier for all other applications.
Keep in mind that it’s not just data recovery you’ll
need to focus on. When you have to recover from a
major outage, you’ll likely need to recover both data
and applications. Many enterprises implement a DR
plan for just data, assuming that servers and
application environments will be manually rebuilt and
recovered if they need to be. By relying on manual
january 2010 e-FOREX | 113