Messaging News - October 2008 - (Page 17)

core takedown of the server, a local power outage, or somebody spilling coffee on something and blowing everything up.” In an extreme example of human error, D’Arcy tells of a large health insurance company in the Midwest that suffered eight hours of devastating downtime when a data center manager, who was giving a tour of the facility to his family, accidentally pushed the wrong button—shutting down the entire data center and crashing all of their critical systems. The difference between these sorts of events, and Although the threat is evident, it hasn’t yet made it to the priority list, says Osterman. “In tight IT and economic times, it’s difficult to say, ‘Well here’s something theoretical that could happen to us,’ and then go to management and tell them you need to spend $250,000 (USD) to protect against it—to upgrade the data centers or whatever the case may be. Organizations tend to prioritize based on what they feel are the most critical needs as opposed to more theoretical needs.” Osterman believes that companies are preparing for human error on some level, but cites the sheer implement security procedures after the fact,” comments Osterman. “I think that companies aren’t as proactive as they need to be. They may have a disaster recovery capability in place, but it may not be as adequate as they need.” Defining Disaster Recovery Under the disaster recovery umbrella, there are three main categories: Disaster Recovery, High Availability, and Business Continuity. “All three are different,” explains D’Arcy. “With disaster recovery the focus is on getting your normal operations up and running again after People tend to take the optimistic view that employees are good people and that they’re honest. It’s contrary to human nature to assume that your colleagues could rob the place blind or take down the network or destroy the business.”—Andrea Skov, Teneros natural disasters, continues D’Arcy, is that even though some instances of human related disasters are very broad, such as the data center outage, they tend to be isolated to disruption in systems particular facilities, or to power, while natural disasters cause all of the above problems at the same time. Alan Elliott, vice president of sales and marketing for Mirapoint, observes, “When we look at critical system failure, whether in IT or otherwise, human error is almost always at the core. Items like incomplete documentation, missing backups, lack of training and short cuts in design and implementation cause many of the failures. To avoid these situations, customers really need a solid foundation and a defined process to ensure the integrity of their applications.” number of priorities they have to consider in parallel, as part of the problem. “If you look at IT priorities around messaging for example, there are many different things they have to do. Obviously they have to provide the core messaging service, anti-spam, anti-virus, and anti-spyware. They have to have encryption, archiving, build in disaster recovery, and there has to be data management and policy retention, and all the rest. If you add it all up there’s probably fifteen or so things they have to do for the messaging system to function properly.” The long list of priorities dictates whether the approach they take will be proactive or reactive. “If you look back to the old days of major virus outbreaks, you see companies scrambling to immediately an incident has occurred. High availability means that you’ve got multi-layered resiliency in place to prevent you from going down in the first place. High availability for email systems means that you might have a remote data center that’s fully replicated, allowing you to failover when your primary data center goes down. This is where high availability and disaster recovery come together. Lastly, there’s business continuity, which essentially fills the gaps between the other two. When something breaks, something else stands in to minimize disruption to the business. In the end, you go through your normal recovery procedure to bring your primary environment back up and running.” “Disaster recovery as a term is very broad. Disaster recovery as messagingnews.com messagingnews.com 17 17 http://www.messagingnews.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - October 2008

Messaging News - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Targeting the Technology-Wise Customer The Insider Threat: The New Era of Disaster Recovery Making Collaboration Tools Pro-Knowledge Sharing Botnets Go Marching On Dissecting Email Forensics Next in Messaging News “On Message” with Ben Gross The World is Not the Center of the Universe, and Filters Don’t Stop Email Spam Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - October 2008

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