MANAGING THROUGH A DISASTER TO RECOVERY

Transcription

1 MANAGING THROUGH A DISASTER TO RECOVERY UPDATING YOUR DR PLAN TO INCORPORATE THE LATEST TECHNOLOGIES IN EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION AND CRISIS COMMUNICATION WHITE PAPER Dell Modular Services THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.

2 INTRODUCTION Disasters and emergency situations can strike at any time. The term, disaster, typically brings to mind serious weather events like tornadoes and fl oods, man-made disasters such as oil spills, or accidents resulting from human error such as a utility crew severing a power line or water main. Though these events are still common in 2006 and 2007 states across America fi led U.S. Disaster Declarations at an average rate of one per week over the past ten years the frequency, magnitude and scope of disasters has broadened to include national wildfi res, pandemic threats, acts of terrorism and crises such as the Virginia Tech Shootings and the mall shootings in Omaha, Nebraska, in December Figure 1. US Disasters by Type Hurricane Severe Ice Storm Tornado Other Snow (4) Coastal Storm (4) Fire Freezing (2) Flood Severe Storm The number of US Disasters Declarations in 2006 The number of US Disasters Declarations filed in 2007 Source: US Disasters 2007 In response to the growing scope and complexity of crisis situations, communication and emergency notifi cation technology has evolved to meet the changing needs of emergency response. Emergency notifi cation technology has become more sophisticated, moving from simple, one-way broadcast notifi cation capabilities to automated intelligent notifi cations and true bi-directional communication across multiple channels and devices. Most recently, emergency notifi cation/communication technologies have broadened their focus to include tools that accelerate the resolution of events and enable better collaboration and coordination among crisis response teams. In order to provide the best protection and safety for employees, constituents and communities, organizations should revisit and update their Disaster Recovery plans to include risk scenarios for new threats. In addition, organizations should seek to automate their disaster recovery plans with the latest technology that enables organizations, schools, local government, as well as multinational corporations to respond quickly and effectively when disaster strikes. Organizations should take advantage of advances in emergency notifi cation and crisis communication tools to ensure that they can locate their people and then move rapidly into managing and resolving the crisis. Preplanning combined with automated, immediate communication capabilities can help ensure that people are safe, informed, engaged and mobilized when an emergency situation arises. This paper provides information on the latest innovations in emergency notifi cation technology, and provides guidance on how to update your disaster recovery plan from a set of documents and processes to an automated and effective solution for disaster recovery. Updating your DR plan with the latest technolgy will help ensure the safety of your people, ensure business viability, and enable swift resolution of crisis situations. AUGUST

3 PROTECTING BUSINESS VIABILITY There are real costs associated with your ability or inability to respond quickly to a crisis or disaster. In addition to the threat to human life, without staff, customers, vendors or partners; a business ability to function comes to a screeching halt. Research shows that 90% of companies unable to resume business operations within fi ve days of a disaster are out of business within one year. 1 Businesses must be able to locate their employees, communicate and collect information, and successfully manage through a crisis in order to maintain business viability. YOU MUST BE ABLE TO COMMUNICATE TO RECOVER The inability to communicate combined with slow mobilization of response teams increase the negative impact of a crisis on your business you must be able to communicate and ensure the right people are engaged in the most expeditious manner when an incident, emergency, or disaster occurs. During an emergency, one of the biggest challenges is to move effi ciently from crisis mode to a managed situation. Automated communication systems make this transition easier because they can reach thousands or tens of thousands of people in an instant without losing the primary message as may occur in a manual person to person call tree. Automated communication is a critical component of converting, managing and mitigating a crisis. But this is not enough. Emergency notifi cation is just the fi rst step. Solutions that extend beyond point notifi cations to enable ongoing communication and collaboration among the crisis team, employees, and other constituents are required to manage through a crisis event quickly. Organizations can ensure higher notifi cation rates and prove better overall management through a crisis to successful recovery. Research concurs, It is critical to mitigate the effects of an emergency by disseminating accurate emergency information before, during and after a crisis. 2 Does your DR Plan incorporate the latest technologies to help you recover when crisis occurs? UPDATING YOUR DR PLAN Your DR plan should be updated with tools that are collaborative in nature, enable teams and people to communicate remotely at any time, over any channel, and without dependency upon your IT infrastructure. Emergency notifi cation and communication technology should provide not only an automated solution for message delivery, but also: Enable companies to reach end users and allow them to respond anytime and from anywhere. Enable notifi cation over any text enabled or voice enabled device (inbound/outbound). Provide local and global notifi cation capabilities. Provide a centralized, interactive tool for executing your DR plan, monitoring tasks and enabling real time coordination of resources and status updates. Many organizations DR efforts fall short once initial notifi cation has occurred. Rarely do organizations have a centralized method for employees, DR teams, executives, customers, etc., to access the DR Plan, task lists, or documents necessary to recovery efforts such as contracts and purchase orders. Prior to purchasing the Dell emergency notifi cation and collaboration product, Crisis Management and Alerting, one large regional health care provider complained that once notifi cation occurred, [we] weren t able to coordinate the simplest of tasks. In a crisis situation, oftentimes employees have no method to stay apprised of information. Stories abound of disaster recovery teams that become occupied answering employee phone calls and answering basic questions about a crisis, and are unable to focus on their primary task managing through a crisis to recovery. AUGUST Source: Neal Rawls, Continuity Central Security Columnist & Author, writing about Avoiding Disaster, by John Laye, Quoted from: 2 Emergency Notification Planning, Jeff Vinning, November, 2007, Gartner.

4 DIFFERENT AUDIENCES HAVE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION NEEDS When thinking about disaster recovery and emergency communication, it is important to realize that within an organization, there are distinct audiences who have different communication needs when a crisis occurs. Employees/General Populace: Need access to basic information such as where to go, when to return to work, and how to locate general information about the crisis situation Disaster Recovery Team Members: Need to account for all employees/constituents safety and assess the state of business operations; need the ability to communicate in real time, disseminate information, track recovery efforts, assign tasks and provision supplies, power, etc.; need the ability to have real time status of the situation Executives/Leaders: Need to know that their employees and constituents are safe; need to know the status of their business and access a high level, real-time status of the recovery efforts; need to be able to communicate with customers, investors, and people external to their business about the crisis. Effective crisis communication requires technology to provide a unifi ed solution for communicating information to all involved constituents and should provide a single source of accurate and up-todate information that can be accessed in the event of a disaster, and is not dependent upon your organization s primary infrastructure. ARE YOU PREPARED? EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION AND DISASTER RECOVERY: PLANNING, TESTING AND TRAINING Dell has helped over 1000 customers execute on their DR plans and respond and notify their employees during disaster situations and ensure the safety of their employees. In talking with customers, Dell found that the two most important objectives for emergency communication were 1) executing the response and recovery efforts; and 2) decreasing the risk of injury to employees. However, despite these goals, most businesses are not prepared to effectively respond to a disaster situation. According to Gartner, Nearly 50% of surveyed organizations are at low levels of DR maturity today. 3 Low levels of DR maturity (Stage 0 or Stage 1) are characterized by the nonexistence of a DR Plan or the existence of an in-process DR project that is in various stages of completion of readiness, but would generally provide limited value in the event of a disaster. One key survey result was that only 15% of enterprises indicated they had no DR management plans or shelfware plans a big difference from the mid- to late 1990s when nearly 50% of enterprises operated in this manner. In contrast, nearly one-third of respondents had moved beyond Stage 0 to Stage 1 DR management as a project. Even more signifi cant was that 50% of respondents placed themselves at Stage 2 (35%), DR management as a process or Stage 3 (15%), DR management as an integral to key business processes. 4 IF YOU FAIL TO PLAN An effective disaster recovery strategy requires process and technology to move from notifi cation to recovery and resolution of the crisis situation. Successful disaster recovery involves preplanning, testing your DR plan and training your employees frequently on disaster recovery steps. Technology yields the tools to automate a rapid response, ensure people are safe and informed, and establish a state of operational readiness. Much has been written on planning for disasters, and at a high level, conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a great fi rst step for assessing your company s ability to respond to a crisis. However, there are two elements of DR planning that organizations often overlook: testing and training, which present unique challenges within the context of disaster recovery. AUGUST Morency, John P. & Scott, Donna, How to Conduct a Disaster Recovery Management Self-Assessment Gartner 9 July Morency, John P. & Scott, Donna, How to Conduct a Disaster Recovery Management Self-Assessment Gartner 9 July 2007.

5 NEW CHALLENGES TO SUCCESSFUL DISASTER RECOVERY AND EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION EFFORTS Planning for a disaster is no easy task. There are many variables involved, and IT and DR Planners must analyze their organization s size, location (or multiple locations), employee base, communication preferences, IT infrastructure, application infrastructure, business processes, and much more to create a disaster recovery strategy that meets the needs of their business. PLANNING FOR THE UNKNOWN One of the paradoxes of disaster recovery planning is that it is impossible to predict or plan for the timing, location, details, or response needed to all disasters or crisis situations yet IT Managers and DR Planners must fi nd a way to prepare for the maximum number of disaster scenarios within the scope of their resources. This involves cross-functional teams across your organization and sometimes in conjunction with your community to adequately prepare for disaster. It also includes the ability to test your plan and keep employees and constituents trained on your crisis response plan. However, testing and training present their own challenges. TESTING DISASTER SCENARIOS The ability to test disaster recovery scenarios essentially in a vacuum and without undue interruption to normal business activities is perceived to be a daunting and time consuming task. However, frequent and systematic disaster recovery testing can make or break the success of an organization s recovery efforts. It is nearly impossible to tell how people or systems will respond unless they are stress tested under realistic simulations. Look for an emergency response solution that provides the ability to easily set up and launch incident templates that are scenario specific. An incident template Flood Response for example should include not only automatic notification pathways, but also language and messages to be used when a fl ood occurs, voice responses, specific survey questions, as well as fl ood specific task lists and documentation that employees can access online without dependency on your primary infrastructure. An automatic notification pathway is an intelligent means of contacting someone. TODAY S WORKFORCE IS GLOBAL Another challenge faced is the capability to communicate with employees, vendors, partners and customers in a global work environment. Communicating in a geographically dispersed work environment across time zones, multiple physical locales, and using multiple communication channels is difficult to coordinate under normal circumstances, but in disaster situations, can be almost impossible. You must understand that each location of your organization is unique in terms of terrain, workforce, infrastructure and communication channels when creating your DR strategy. Seek notifi cation solutions that are global, support multiple languages, and provide secure distributed management to enable local crisis management with one, unifi ed solution. Then test geographically isolated crisis resolution capabilities repeatedly from different locations around the globe. AND MOBILE: Today business is conducted across a variety of communication channels and devices. Depending upon personal preference, time of day or business context, people use phones, the Internet, wireless devices, pagers, and text messages to communicate. Emergency notifi cation must be sophisticated and intelligent in order to ensure, in case of disaster, you can reach all of your employees and constituents quickly, and based on the communication channel and device of their choice. For many organizations today, telephone call trees are no longer an acceptable method of emergency notifi cation during a crisis. Given the advances in communication technologies, organizations must test their response planning at different times and via out of offi ce communication vehicles to ensure the highest possible response rates and continuity for all communication channels. Once your solution is in place and meets the challenges of disaster recovery planning, provide frequent and repeated training across the organization to help your employees and constituents respond immediately in case of disaster. AUGUST

6 SIX COMPONENTS OF EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION, COMMUNICATION AND DISASTER RECOVERY TECHNOLOGY Crises happen. Rarely is there warning or adequate time to plan once disaster strikes. To respond and survive the unknown and meet the complex challenges of recovering from a crisis event, companies must have not only a disaster recovery plan, but technology that is fl exible and broad enough to implement and enable notifi cation, interactive communication and recovery. Key requirements for emergency notifi cation technology include the ability to: 1. TEST ALL PLAN ASSUMPTIONS: Use an automated unifi ed solution to test all aspects of emergency notifi cation and response, and then communicate lessons learned and data to upper management. Data points such as number of employees reached, time to respond, number of escalations required before response, response devices used, etc. help your organization understand and improve their crisis response plans. A notifi cation solution should allow you to actually pre-build multiple emergency scenarios and corresponding responses into the system, test them, and then have them ready to deploy at a click of a mouse in case of actual disaster. 2. ACCOUNT FOR ALL CONSTITUENTS: Use an automated solution that accesses accurate, up to date contact information, applies logic to the notifi cation process, and locates and notifi es employees and constituents via their channel or device of choice. Today s emergency notifi cation solutions also should provide polling capabilities as well as provide complex escalation paths that are easy to set up and administer, to ensure the best chance of notifi cation reaching the intended audience. 3. ENABLE COMMUNICATION & DISSEMINATE INFORMATION: Emergency notifi cation solutions today must provide bi-directional, multi-channel communication that will quickly, securely and reliably distribute and collect information in real-time, using multiple device types to ensure contact with your constituents. Multiple communication channels such as inbound toll free phone lines, live conference bridges, and intranet access all contribute to your employee s ability to contact you and stay connected. Globalized multi-language solutions are required, as well. 4. COORDINATE PEOPLE, ACTIVITIES, TASKS, AND INFORMATION RELATED TO RECOVERY EFFORTS: To enable the recovery process, it is essential to provide a collaborative virtual space that is secure, easily accessible, and not dependant on local infrastructure. Your organization should be able to store crisis information that can be accessed, viewed, and updated by individual employees, team, and groups that you can set up and permission. Actionable task lists, interactive audit logs and remote access to documentation such as contract templates, purchase orders, and DR documentation are necessary requirement to effective disaster recovery. 5. KEEP ALL CONSTITUENTS UP-TO-DATE ON THE RECOVERY PROCESS: Provide a single source of truth via portal technology that is part of your notifi cation solution, but independent from your organization s infrastructure and enables employees and constituents to contact your organization. Emergency communication technology should provide permission-based access to this information so that, for example, the public can access updates about your business, while DR teams and IT staff can talk via conference lines, access purchase orders and task lists, or employees can fi nd out if they re needed at work. AUGUST

7 6. PROVIDE MEASUREMENT: Emergency notifi cation and communication technology must provide useful and accurate metrics during test scenarios, during a crisis, and after your recovery efforts are complete. Each crisis scenario typically brings its own set of challenges. Your ability to measure DR efforts will help evolve your plan and help you understand how well you performed under both test scenarios and actual crisis response. Complete audit trails, incident logs and fl exible reporting is key technology for emergency communication. Key Capability Test Your Plan Technological Feature Account for all Constituents Enable Communication regardless of device preference or location Coordinate Activities and Tasks Provide accurate and up to date information throughout the crisis Provide Measurement CONCLUSION When it comes to achieving a rapid resolution to crisis events, the options for more fl exible and interactive solutions have evolved beyond crisis notifi cation. It is time for crisis managers to look beyond just emergency notifi cation to truly utilize the full power of crisis collaboration and communications to ensure employee safety as well as crisis management, and ensure smoother and faster recovery of business operations. AUGUST

8 DELL MODULAR SERVICES DELL CRISIS MANAGEMENT & ALERTING SERVICES CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION During crisis events, normal lines of communication often fail when you need them most. Reaching employees and their leadership teams located in unusual sites is a challenge that most companies cannot meet. Once contacted, the Crisis Management & Alerting services provide a communication framework to enable collaboration and accelerate recovery of the situation. The Emergency Notifi cation service harnesses all available communication channels to fi nd people, deliver messages, and collect information. The Incident Collaboration Center provides additional collaboration tools to manage through crisis events and accelerate recovery times. Crisis Management & Alerting services are designed from the ground up to meet the unique needs of large enterprises for multi-team support, security, data integration, compliance auditing, and mass notifi cation to hundreds of thousands of users. Automated message delivery and escalation In-bound communication lines for hard-to-reach contacts in 87 different countries English, French, German and Spanish language support Global, two-way native SMS supported globally Secure distributed management to enable local crisis management with a single globally-deployed solution Enterprise data security and access control Real-time auditing and reporting Full global support for any size customer Web services API for integration with corporate systems Collaborative incident logs to track events Formal task management and secure document sharing Publicly share information via emergency website AUGUST

9 DELL MODULAR SERVICES DELL MANAGEMENT SERVICES (EMS TM ) CONTINUITY, ARCHIVING, AND SECURITY In addition to communicating with employees, must continue to function to allow continued business operations. Dell Management Services (EMS ) is designed to provide comprehensive protection in a single, on-demand service. EMS helps eliminate the downtime, compliance, and fi nancial risk of managing . EMS can be deployed in a day, has predictable monthly costs, and requires minimal maintenance. EMS integrated continuity, archiving, and security services help lower costs and maintenance complexity. Help eliminate downtime and data loss. Make outages virtually invisible to users Control retention, accelerate e-discovery. Can globally search archive in seconds. Reduce data stores as much as 80%. Effectively fi lter spam and viruses. Achieve a low TCO for a high level of protection. EMS is designed to provide the control and flexibility to meet evolving challenges, EMS can eliminate all the risks of managing . ABOUT DELL Millions of people around the world depend on Dell Modular Services on-demand solutions for business continuity, archiving and disaster recovery. More than one thousand CIOs at global companies including Allianz Global Investors, Siemens and the American Red Cross Lee County Florida, trust Dell to prevent downtime, protect communications and data, and streamline compliance and discovery. CONTACT DELL TODAY For additional information including pricing and a free demo, please visit Dell The Management Services, and EMS are trademarks of Dell. Microsoft, Outlook and Active Directory are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. AUGUST