Reading the riot act

Civil unrest across the UK has underlined the need for effective disaster recovery. Fleur Doidge prepares for the worst

Few could have predicted the scale of the riots and looting that caused an estimated £200m in damage to UK businesses in early August. Many of the companies targeted by so-called "recreational looters" may be thanking their lucky stars for their disaster recovery (DR) plans and systems. Others, watching the events, may perhaps now wish to invest further in DR - offering an expanding opportunity for the channel.

Graham Oakes, an independent IT strategy consultant, says DR is a complex area and one where the channel could be profiting more.

"A retailer whose premises have burned down has very different needs to, say, a manufacturer. The retailer must be accessible to the public, so its location is fundamental, unless [perhaps] they transact purely online. A manufacturer can probably operate from different premises without too many problems, but needs specialist equipment and so on," he says [pictured, right].

Technology providers can help their customers understand their DR options and analyse the facilities they must protect. Most companies today depend on their IT systems not only for communications but for record-keeping and more -- meaning they are increasingly vulnerable to systems failures or unexpected shutdown.

"They are generally aware of the need to take regular backups, store these backups offsite and the like, but their actions may not fully live up to this awareness. These can be complex things to set up, and they are never top of the list of priorities," he says.

"Again, the channel can help by creating easy-to-use services that pull together a range of offerings that together can do a lot to create an effective DR plan."

And the answer to more widespread adoption, he says, lies in the cloud, which makes it economically feasible for companies of all sizes to set up DR sites for a wider range of scenarios.

Furthermore, large DR specialists often do not have the sales organisations to interact with SMBs - nor are they able to converse in non-technical language.

"The channel should be ideally placed to fill these gaps," Oakes says.

Cloud once again the answer

Ian Masters, UK sales director at Vision Solutions [pictured, left] agrees. Businesses are more connected than ever and have to deal with multiple platforms hosting expanding volumes of data, which must be secured and protected. And simply backing it all up is no good if the customer cannot retrieve it in a timely manner.

"Managed services are becoming more popular as end users are reluctant to invest in further physical infrastructure. Cloud has also opened up this market further, making enterprise DR offerings available to the broader SME market," he says.

"Resellers can now provide new cloud recovery and DR-as-a-service options to customers, as well as advanced solutions that protect new virtualised environments and traditional physical systems. Cross-platform protection will give resellers an advantage over competitors that can support only one or two."

Robert Rutherford, managing director of IT services at consultancy and support provider QuoStar, says his firm is seeing some wins from offering, explaining and selling DR to SMBs as well as larger enterprises. QuoStar has been hard at work expanding its sales team in anticipation of achieving 100 per cent growth in the year ending March 2012 - up from 60 per cent in its fiscal year that ended March 2011.

That has happened partly because small firms as well as large ones now understand IT as being key to their business success. Cloud has meant the cost of DR has come down, enabling data and even systems and infrastructure to be replicated across to a remote UK location via the cloud.

Companies that may have had to cough up £100,000 a year for DR now may have to find only £20,000 for benefits that go well beyond online backup, incorporating DR with ongoing high availability and business continuity. And customers pay only for what they use, he says.

However, Rutherford adds that one of the largest challenges is convincing companies to prioritise DR before something actually goes wrong and takes down their site.

"Smaller companies are not doing a lot with DR. There is a real problem as it is not taken as seriously as it should be," he warns.

"But once a company has had a disaster, it will chuck everything at it. It will see something such as riots on the news, and say, ‘Oh, we must look at it [DR]'. And it will be put on the board meeting agenda, and [then] no one takes responsibility."

As a result, consultancy around customer education is more important than ever, Rutherford says.

Tailor-made customer service

James Carnie, founder and sales director of offsite datacentre management specialist eLINIA [pictured, left], says one of his clients in fact did lose a site in the London riots. However, its IT - replicated securely offsite - was unaffected.

"For our customers, we replicate data at two or more datacentres that are 50 miles apart, and provide failover services," he says.

The approach taken is to work out in detail what sort of DR, with what scale and scope, will work best for each customer.

Carnie explains that eLINIA works out the customer's recovery point objective and recovery time objective, and moves forward from that point.

Only a few customers really need around-the-clock up-time, so most need to work out exactly what would represent a cost-effective DR solution for them. Availability 99.9 per cent of the time is often sufficient, he says.

"We ask, ‘how much data are you willing to lose, and how long can the business survive with such-and-such a system down?' Some data must be replicated synchronously, and systems might always need to be up. That would probably be a premium service," Carnie says.

He adds that accreditation, including ISO 27,0001 and PCI/DSS compliance, is important for providers.

Carnie concludes that the time may therefore be ripe for the channel to encourage more customers to invest in DR, and anecdotal evidence suggests that customers are finally becoming keener.

"With cloud and virtualisation, you can have a cut-down platform, to replicate perhaps the data that needs to be replicated in real time to datacentre two," Carnie says.

"And outsourcing - which can be quite an emotive subject for the IT department - for some reason the DR part of that is never a problem."

Rabih Arzouni, head of managed services at Databarracks [pictured, right] says it offers its vendor-agnostic managed DR services flexibly to resellers, including access to its data "bunker".

"We help the business build the solution and project-manage it for the full cycle of the project. Then we offer delivery and also implementation. So we work together with the channel to deliver the solution, and we have different approaches so we can be hands-on or hands-off, depending on the expertise of the channel partner," he says.

Arzouni says the cost advantages and flexibility of cloud DR are too compelling to ignore. "It is all going to be pretty much in the cloud from now on. And the cost of running DR in the cloud has gone down significantly, particularly the cost of hardware."

The opportunities are still out there for those who can differentiate themselves, especially in the light of current events, Arzouni adds, even if the DR landscape is becoming more crowded.

Links with other solutions

Any opportunity concerning the general drive for cost-cutting may also mean VARs can offer DR as an add-in or integral component. According to Keith Ricketts, global marketing director at remote-access key vendor Becrypt, Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council recently finished a deployment that included DR, sold in response to the authority's request for help to make its IT more efficient and cost-effective.

The council invested in secure mobile working to support its IT backup plans, with a view to slashing its hardware costs by 80 per cent, he says. It ordered 90 licences for Becrypt's Trusted Client USB-key based software, which will be supplied to staff to give them secure VPN access from wherever they are.

"We have channel customers including large organisations such as systems integrators, like Fujitsu, and we sell to central government [and others]," Ricketts [pictured, right] says.

"And we are going through the more traditional channel - with resellers including SPL and Sapphire, and distributors such as Sigma, a combination of box shifters and those providing services and solutions."

Jeanette Hilton, head of customer and ICT services at the council, says Newcastle-under-Lyme wanted to find a competitively priced, CoCo-compliant, secure remote access offering.

"Its small footprint has meant our staff can use their own personal PCs and laptops that may have limited memory to run some desktop applications," Hilton says.

"[It] forms part of our overall risk management strategy to ensure our information is secure."

The software on the keys can talk to the council's thin-client desktop virtualisation software via a secure VPN at the Civic Offices, which is mirrored offsite to provide backup.

When used on a USB stick, the Trusted Client app assumes that the host computer is compromised and restarts it, booting into a corporate OS image isolated from the host computer's OS. No data can be saved locally. In a disaster, users can also connect remotely and securely to the backup network.

Never too late?

Robert Winter, chief engineer at Kroll Ontrack, says that many data management and recovery specialists will offer a partnering opportunity for VARs that wish to go beyond backup and remote data storage. And although effective DR needs to happen quickly, it can still be achieved post-disaster.

"Irreparable data loss often occurs after the event, where improper procedure and untrained attempts at recovery further complicate the situation," he says. "The first hour after a data loss event is the most critical. No matter how catastrophic the situation may seem, there is a good chance of recovering the data, regardless of how it was lost."

Winter says that if a location catches fire, or even if it is burned down - as happened to some unlucky businesses in the path of the looters [some are pictured, left] during the recent riots - data can even be recovered from fire and water-damaged media. Kroll Ontrack has had some success achieving this - even on the space shuttle Columbia.

"Computers near the seat of the fire tend to be unrecoverable as the extreme heat buckles the disk platters. But successful recovery is much more likely from computers on the periphery of the fire," says Winter.

"Disk drives that have been subjected just to smoke will often stop working because the smoke particles prevent the read/write heads operating correctly. The heads fly above the platters at a height that is less than the diameter of a smoke particle."

Earlier this year, the firm relaunched its channel partner programme. The partner logs data recovery requests with technicians at Kroll Ontrack, who dispatch a courier to collect the media and deliver to their lab and clean rooms in Epsom, Surrey where a full assessment can be made. Partners get access to video tutorials, discounts and additional monthly promotions, says Winter.