Disaster Recovery Software – Are you prepared? February 7, 2008
Posted by Jay Melton in Inovis Solutions, News, Technology.Tags: Data translation, disaster recovery, EDI, Software, supply chain, Transact
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While I was sitting in the airport this past week I was reading an article about 14,000 email accounts being wiped out. The provider was doing routine maintenance when the accounts were erased, and there was no backup plan in place so all data was lost. It seems as though a data disaster can hit anyone at anytime. The question is, do you have a disaster recovery plan?
I admit it, “disaster recovery” sounds so…Hollywood. I see Armaggeddon, The Towering Inferno, The Day After Tomorrow, The China Syndrome, etc. The thing is, lost data and interrupted processes are truly catastrophic for a business. A 2006 business study found that 50% of businesses that lose their data go out of business within 24 months, and 93% within 5 years. A 2005 survey of 1200 businesses found that nearly one-third of them do not have emergency continuity plans in place. To ensure your business is prepared for any unexpected outage or loss, it is critical that you have a plan in place before disaster strikes. In regards to EDI software , this means if a system/server/box goes down, you have a backup system to move to.
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This is the primary reason backup licenses are sold, to insure your systems continue running smoothly. Just imagine a simple thing like the system crashing that runs your EDI software. Your incoming documents back up since you can’t translate. Your outgoing stops cold. Sure, software support can probably get you up and running on a new system fairly soon, but everything in the meantime is backed up and potentially lost. Your trading partners start screaming. As a supplier, your invoices stop going out and you miss purchase orders. As a purchaser, your purchase orders stop going out and you miss invoices. This could lead to chargebacks in some industries and lost sales in others. Suffice to say it can cost you money and time.
I was recently speaking with a member of our Professional Services team, and they mentioned some people don’t see the need to have disaster recovery or test licenses, so the issue above of routine maintenance on a live system is entirely possible. A backup license can help you avoid disruptions, reduce downtime costs and prevent data loss. So, the question is, do you have a disaster recovery plan in place?
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I hesitated on commenting on this post – because we’ve dealt with the issues of test/disaster recovery licensing for TLi…..
And the outcome was that we do not have those licenses…. And there is a reason – COST…. and it’s a BIG reason…. for it’s a BIG COST….
When it comes to disaster recovery, we’re covered in pretty much every other way – except our translator…. we have a dedicated box to serve as our back up in case of catastrophic failure…. it’s usually within an hour of current production data and can be used nearly immediately with almost no down time or hiccups in data synchronization….
But why we don’t have a TLi license (and will figure out what to do in case of that failure at that time) is the cost…. We were quoted a large chunk of cash for that license…. and it’s just more money than is viable for us to even consider it….
Our company paid the price for the Disaster Recovery system license for Trusted Link because we know how important it is to be back up and running quickly. We have a separate system for this purpose and High-availabilty software which constantly replicates changes on our live system to the Backup system.
But, we’ve hit one big problem. Our backup system can be made operational very quickly in the event of a disaster. Getting Trusted Link up and running isn’t so fast. The problem is with the Lock and Key.
When we switch to the Disaster Recovery machine, we are always forced to call Inovis Support to get a new and temporary Lock and Key. Since this isn’t during “nomal business hours”, this can take time. (It took almost 2 hours during our last switch.) When we switch back to our production system, we again need to get a new Lock and Key for this machine. Because this was also before 9:00 am, we were also only given a temporary key for our production system, good for just 5 days. I needed to call again later in the day to get the permanent Lock and Key.
This routine will repeat itself every time we need to switch, whether it’s a real disaster or another test of this system.
Our High Availablilty Software allows us to protect specific data so that it isn’t replicated to the backup system. We would like to protect the Lock and Key on both systems so that Trusted Link is always ready to go on either system.
I’ve asked Inovis Support several times how we can protect this number but no one has been able to give us an answer. This number must be saved somewhere. Trusted Link is the only one of our systems that cannot be back up and running quickly and without additional input from our operators every time.
Can anyone tell us what we can protect so that we don’t lose both Lock and Keys every time we need to make the switch?