Venyu Blog

If you’re on a budget but you still have a need for cogent yet comprehensive disaster recovery, this month’s CIO Magazine (also online here), details what it was like for a trio of public and privately-held organizations to support business continuity and disaster recovery on a budget. Among those interviewed to discuss their experiences:

• Tim Barbee, CIO North Central Texas Council of Governments who initiated a project to develop a business-impact analysis on the DR requirements for each of the agency’s departments, ultimately a price point that exceeded $1 million. With cutbacks at all levels of government, however, a more frugal choice had to be made—into the cloud— where Barbee and his team could access a hosted email platform, including backup and recovery and of course, an Internet connection.

• Marty Gromberg, SVP and CIO, A&E Television Networks who assigned key personnel to complete their critical tasks in an assigned block of time using a conference room and scheduling each in one-hour blocks on a 24-hour schedule. Each business unit would then be allocated three hours each to complete their priority tasks. This same principle of time allocation was applied to the network’s virtual services, including buying a limited number of Citrix licenses to assign to virtual seats where remote staff could perform critical functions. The upshot is that through this combination of rotating physical and virtual access Gromberg has been able to identify which tasks are most important to continue in a crisis and which can simply be put “on hold.”

• Paul T. Cottey, CIO, Accretive Health who aligned its data center DR needs with a tier-one provider. While Accretive provisions the backup services for its needs, the tier-one provider “provides” the generators, diesel fuel, cold air and network-management resources. According to Cottey the arrangement effectively serves as a reservation for data center space that might otherwise be hard to come by in the event of a disaster. Reconciling costs also favored this arrangement because even though Accretive is paying a relatively low rate, it receives premium disaster-recovery capabilities in sharing the tier-one provider’s space with larger companies running their critical systems. “In our search,” said Cottey, “we specifically inquired about other clients and asked to share space with those who needed even higher recovery standards than ours. Sometimes, it pays to be the smaller fish in a big pond.”

For more information on backup and recovery of your data and the disaster recovery solutions available to your company read about Venyu’s latest data center addition inside the Cyber Innovation Center at the National Cyber Research Park in Bossier-Shreveport, LA. here