SNAP SHOT: DATA CENTER TRANSFORMATION

Now, with extensive Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP) initiatives under way, most federal agencies are seeking ways to keep costs low, while speeding recovery. Solutions that offer enhanced network security, offsite recovery locations and tactics to speed recovery are increasingly being utilized.

At the same time, agencies must navigate federal regulatory COOP requirements as directed in Presidential Decision Directive 67, and Executive Orders 12656 and 13286. Not only must continuity preparations mesh seamlessly with current agency IT plans, they must also be flexible enough to function in nearly any scenario. In the event of a pandemic or highly contagious influenza outbreak, for example, federal workers would very likely be ordered to stay at home. Demand for telework would likely soar, and industry observers maintain that federal emergency managers face a tough challenge in trying to support the explosion of traffic likely to occur on agency networks.

Government oversight organizations require COOP to be so ingrained that all critical operational activities account for it in upfront planning and development cycles. Often, however, due to the high cost and complexity of continuity solutions, many government organizations are forced to compromise, recovering only the most critical systems or applications. Increasingly, federal agencies and departments find that falling back on legacy systems and processes won’t work in the foreseeable future. These systems face annually increasing costs, particularly in terms of software to maintain current applications – including backup, provisioning, performance and systems monitoring, as well as high availability software. Federal agencies also face a skills shortage, as they struggle to replace older workers with personnel able to manage aging technologies already in place.

The Gartner Group recommends all organizations have data center recovery plans that, at a minimum, will:

Enable large numbers of employees to work from home for extended periods;

Provide the means for workers to collaborate remotely;

Maintain consistent communication with partners, constituents and other stakeholders.

To ensure continuity in times of crisis, “federal agencies must define the operational risks that require mitigation and the investments needed to effectively support that mitigation process,” said John Morency, research director, Disaster Recovery and IT Operations Continuity for Gartner, Inc., in a recent webinar. “Every organization must review the impact of unplanned data center downtime against affordable investments that can help reduce some or all of this impact,” he continued. “A clear understanding of the relevant risks together with proven mitigation investment strategies can enable IT managers to define both a viable and sellable IT operations recovery strategy,” he explained.

Virtual Recovery

Some federal organizations are implementing virtualization technologies to remove the 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.

Disaster Recovery Advice

According to Gartner’s John Morency, there are several steps federal IT organizations can take to improve COOP responsiveness and meet regulatory objectives, including:

Rank the order of each agency’s applications recovery risk;

Conduct a gap analysis to align IT management with application recovery risk mitigation priorities;

Use the gap analysis results to drive 2009 disaster recovery initiatives;

Address the agency’s key pain points;

Select and track the most appropriate IT disaster recovery continuous improvement metrics;

Continue to work toward the development of a 24/7 support