Before Planning for Disaster Recovery

I posted before The Difference Between Backup and Disaster Recover, I will explain more about disaster recovery, and I hope these information will help you to build an accurate disaster recovery plan that meets your organization strategy and needs.

One of the most important steps for IT people is to create “Business Impact Analysis” (BIA) before planning for disaster recovery at any organization, BIA is essential to success your disaster recovery planning, no matter how you do it whether by using computer software, survey, interview …etc., and by internal team or external team through contract with outsourcing company.

The benefits of BIA are to gather information to help the organization in planning for disaster recovery , design the disaster recovery site and prioritize computer application and software used by business/functional departments and keep the IT people focused on achieving the goals and objectives of disaster recovery.

BIA is a tool to document information about applications; all information will be analyzed to help the organization in disaster recovery planning. Sometimes you need experts to handle analyzing BIAs and document all analysis results to develop accurate disaster recovery plans.

The continent of BIA template is include but not limited to:

          1-      Name of application,

          2-      Department name,

          3-      Work hours for this application (i.e from 8:00 Am to 9:00 Am),

          4-      Number of users,

          5-      Effect on organization ( i.e Reputation, Cost, Legal..etc),

          6-      Key process for the application (i.e Reports to government, customer service, billing…etc.),

          7-      There is any alternative procedure when application is down,

          8-      Related Hardware and Software,

          9-      Infrastructure needed, and

          10-   Application administrator name.

Starting Customer Care Service

I don’t want to talk here about IT service provider to external customer or client, my post for IT people placed in the same organization with business departments.

IT people have customers so the IT people should know the customer care, how to deal with their customers and keeping them satisfied is one of the major responsibilities for IT people. Customers of IT are all people use the applications, computers and all IT services and solutions. In any organization IT people implement IT services and solutions, what about after implementation services (warranty, maintenance, spare parts …etc.). All customers like to be satisfied about services, IT people customers so.

Many of IT People don’t know the basic principles to serve their customers, what is the impact?

“If don’t care about your customers you will lose your business”. IT people will lose their business when they ignore customer care, negative impact will report to the management about bad service or non qualified services.

What IT people have to do to keep their customers satisfied?

My advices here are:

1.      Be careful about customer’s needs.

2.      Solve incidents and problems quickly.

3.      Develop a service improvement plan.

4.      Implement updates as needed.

5.      Monitor and control IT environment.

6.      Try to automate all customer procedures and functions if applicable.

7.      Practice customers on new IT features related to customers work.

8.      Teach IT teams how to resolve conflicts and disputes, and how to communicate to their customers.

9.      Sign service level agreement (SLA) between IT and business departments.

Incidents should be visible

One of reasons to employing IT people is to manage and resolve daily incidents, but not all organizations believe the helpdesk will be a very good tool to ease the communication between end users or customers and IT People, some of organizations use telephone, email or fax to report incidents to IT people, it’s applicable for small business, but what about 500+ employees with 50+ application and 200,000 customer?

We have to care bout incidents, some incidents cost the organizations time and money, IT people should track all incidents till resolved; with phone, email or fax not all incidents will appear to IT people  on a proper time which means cost the organization more money and time, you can’t create a decision reports to resolve the root cause of high frequency incidents, no report about IT employees performance, no priorities for incidents.

What about one communication channel between IT people and end users or customers, this channel offer a documentation for all incidents, categorized and prioritized incidents, monitor and control resolutions and maybe escalate unresolved incident to higher level technician, what about employee’s evaluations about their work on incidents resolution, and logging all resolutions in a Known Error Database, all those benefits and more can be easily implemented by using helpdesk systems.

IT people should view all incidents in a proper time, so the incidents should be visible all the time.

Backup and Disaster Recovery, What the difference?

Do you know what is the difference between backup and disaster recovery? Did you think before about those terms before?

All of us hear about backup, there is always a reminder in our life, you see it in smartphone and with software tips, but disaster recovery is not listed in our terms list it’s not in our dictionary.

Most of small business owners mostly don’t know the difference between backup and disaster recovery, today’s blog, is lowdown of backup vs. disaster recovery, to know the deference.

Backup, what is it?

Let’s start with basics, what is backup? In summary, backup is copying data to storage. This can be through DVD, SAN storage or by means of remotely storage "Cloud".

It is very important to have a backup solution in place. You will protect your data loss in case of employee accidents (delete data), theft (Laptop lost) and technical problems (Server crash); with backup you can restore your data easily.

Disaster Recovery, What is it?

Disaster recovery is similar to backup but disaster recovery used for larger instances. A full image of your servers and disks are mirrored. The image increases the probability to restore your systems faster than re-installing OS and restoring data.

Now read the term “Disaster” does this term make sense to you, don’t get caught up on this term and believe it has to be a major accident. A disaster can be your networks equipment’s and servers are crashes and all of the organization employees no longer work for one day or more. With disaster recovery plan, the organization employees can continue to work using the mirrored systems and servers and IT people work on fixing the problem at main site “Original systems place” while all of business employees are working on the mirrored systems.

Backup is similar to disaster recovery, but disaster recovery is more wider than backup and disaster recovery plan contains backup plans, backup is needed to restore data when case of loss of original data, data in disaster recovery is not needed to restore, employees are moved to work on the mirrored systems in case of data loss or system crash in main data location.

IT people is always right?

My professional career path gives me the chance to think about this question "IT people is always right?", IT people think most of time they have the power to put them in winner side and giving them the permission to be right always.
I worked for many years always I faced a conflict between the  IT and Business, my role as IT Manager gave me  the chance to be in the IT side but as a professional IT Manager I should keep the business satisfy and some time say for business "Yes, you are right", cause they know what is the business need more than IT,  when we think like this we will enhance our relationship as IT people with the Business people.

When you plan to build a success IT organization you should work to enable the needs of the business, remember you have to support business to deliver mission and to help the business to enable vision not fighting the business once you think like that you put your foot on the success way of your IT organization.

make sure the business is part of your success plan your support to the business one of the success keys  for your IT Organization.


My answer now is clear about the question "IT people  is always Right?" is of course "No".

IT Problem Management

Introduction

The IT Problem Management helps IT people to identify the root cause of an error, resolving a problem will fix the error which means stop these incidents from occurring in the future. Problem resolution and elimination of root cause often calls for applying a change to the configuration item in the existing IT environment.

IT Problem Management Definition

Wikipedia defines IT problem management as an IT service management discipline designed to “minimize the adverse imp

act of incidents and problems on business that are caused by errors within the IT infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of incidents related to these errors”.

Which means effective IT Problem Management will reduce the cost, increase the availability and gives the IT people the time to focus on the business not on support and fixing errors.

IT Problem Management Objectives

The primary objectives of IT Problem Management are to prevent IT problems and resulting incidents from happening, to eliminate recurring incidents and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented.

IT Problem Management Benefits

The main benefits from IT Project Management:

•  Improving IT service quality. Remember that high quality and reliable service is very good for business. 

•  Reducing number of incidents. Proactive problem management is instrumental in reducing the number of incidents that interrupt the business/organization every day.

• Build a known error database (Knowledge Base). Documenting the known errors and solutions will reduce the number and impact of problems.

•  Give the IT people the opportunity to start self-learning. One of the main concepts for IT problem management is learning from past experience. The process document all previous errors and problems to identify trends, and the means of preventing failures and of reducing the impact of failures, resulting in improved productivity.

•  Increase the rate of fixing errors by the Service Desk. Problem management enables the Service Desk to know how to deal with problems and incidents that have previously been resolved and documented.

IT Problem Management Processes
1. Identifying and Reporting Problems

A problem can be generated in a number of ways like:

• Problem form by IT staff member.

• Generate a problem from an incident by IT staff member.

• Service catalog allows user to log problems.

•  A problem can be generated from an email.

A problem can be associated with a configuration item using CMDB (I will talk about it in future) to help the problem management team see the affected item and its relationships to other configuration items and to measure the impact on the business.

Resolving problem can be done by a user or group. Which means the problem can be assigned to a user or group and this can be done manually or automatically.

The problem can be generated from an incident. This gives the problem management team the opportunity to quickly refer to knowledge base already generated and find the solution or start workaround to reduce the problem impact on the business. Once the problem is solved all related incidents will be solved.

2. Investigating and Updating Problems

Problem was identified and reported in the first step, the second step is to know what is the problem, what it is impact on business and do updates on the problem.

In this stage the user or group was assigned to solve this problem will start solving the problem and update the problem status and information.

Problem can be associated to Service Level Agreement (SLA) to monitor the progress of the problem according to the defined rules in the SLA. As time passes, the SLA will dial up the priority of the problem, and leave a marker as to its progress. SLAs can also be used as a performance indicator for the problem management team.

3. Resolving Problems

If a problem needs a change in order to be resolved, it is possible to request a change (Read My previous blog “IT Change Management”), which will be then resolved using the change management process.

Once you start saving the problem by using change management the problem will be closed when the change is close.


Workflow Sample

Here is a sample of Problem Management workflow (The workflow for IT Problem Management is configurable; it depends on the work environment).

Don't Do This Mistake #4

Introduction

Most of IT managers have a backup solution in case of disaster; and IT Managers was set the tools (softwares and/or hardwares) to implement backup solution to meet business needs.

Definition

Backup solution is a tools (software and/or hardware) to safe your data on storage media (Tape, HD, DVD, etc.).

Why backup solution?

Backup solution is the key weapon in case of disasters (i.e. lost data, hardware failure, natural disaster, etc.). Once you lost the information stored on your IT Assets the business will affect negatively. So you need the backup to recover the business.

Testing Backup Solution

Backup solution is the key part of your backup plan, and you have to integrate all backup plan parts to get the value from backup solution (what we are taking about in this post). The big mistake I want to mention it is not testing your backup solution.

Testing your backup solution is a very important part of your backup plan and it is the key to make sure your backup solution is working correctly. Don’t forget testing your backup solution you don’t know when you need to use one of your backup it is working normally and the backup was taken correctly.

Remember that

Backup solution is the key of your backup plan this key must be tested to make sure this key will work normally when you need it.

And also remember

Not testing your backup solution is a big mistake.