By
Barbara DePompa
The ongoing threat of a terrorist attack, pandemic or other natural or manmade disaster has forced a government-wide sharpening of disaster recovery response plans during the last several years.
In mid-June, for example, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted an exercise to test the readiness and capabilities of federal departments and agencies, coordinating with the White House, to execute their Continuity of Operations (COOP) plans. COOP is used by all federal government organizations to help restore operational (IT) support for personnel, partners and constituents in the event of an emergency that causes a loss of facilities or computing assets. The June exercise, known as Eagle Horizon, was a mandatory annual exercise for all executive branch departments and agencies coordinated by DHS through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its National Continuity Programs (NCP) Directorate.
The exercise “was critical to testing our continuity of operations procedures and ensuring coordination across the federal government in the event of a major emergency,” said DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, in a prepared statement. “A carefully designed and well-practiced national continuity plan significantly enhances our ability to react swiftly and effectively to any incident we may face.”
In a national emergency, federal departments and agencies may be required to relocate to alternate sites. Eagle Horizon simulates such an event, and triggers a cohesive, overlapping national continuity plan vital to the continued performance of essential government functions. The exercise focused on coordination between federal agencies and tested the Federal Executive Branch Continuity alert, notification and deployment procedures as well as interagency continuity communications. Emergency Relocation Group members were sent by their respective agencies to pre-planned alternate locations and asked to implement COOP procedures.
Continuity plans require agencies to select the functions that are essential to operations. Essential functions are those jobs that personnel must perform regardless of circumstances. Examples of such functions are health care, law enforcement, border patrol, communications and environmental containment.
Safeguarding electronic assets and data is also a critical element of COOP efforts. Agencies must ensure electronic records and resources are backed up and mirrored at a second location in the event data and/or systems are damaged at a primary location. Agencies must also conduct tests and training exercises, to ensure the backup operations can support their needs if networks fail for any reason. This is why most federal agencies continuously seek ways to cost effectively speed recovery, provide enhanced network security, as well as offsite recovery locations. In recent years, COOP and Telework have been closely linked as a way for federal agencies to allow workers to access applications and information when they can’t get to their usual offices. For example, in the event of a pandemic emergency, workers may be asked to stay home to avoid spreading germs for days or weeks at a time.
Technologically speaking, when comes to quickly collecting, compressing (or deduplicating) and transmitting data, Data Domain provides a disk-based storage appliance for backup and disaster recovery that uses a compression algorithm designed to ensure data being transmitted doesn’t already exist on a host platform. Technologies to aid in compressing and moving large volumes of data can be extremely important for disaster recovery purposes.
Some federal organizations are also implementing virtualization technologies to lower the cost and dependence on ‘one to one’ mirroring of data and systems for disaster recovery. Virtualization can help consolidate multiple servers onto one or more physical systems, allowing multiple virtual machines with dissimilar operating systems to concurrently run on the same physical host system. Virtualization can also help agencies achieve COOP goals by allowing IT organizations to ‘reuse’ older servers at disaster recovery sites, eliminating the need to buy new servers to comply with federal COOP regulations.