Disaster Recovery Our story and lessons learned

“To be or not to be (anymore), that is the (BCP) question“Quinet Gregory with the help of William Shakespeare

Context

• Belgian fashion retailer

• 1 HQ Kontich

• 125 Shops BeLux

• 115 M€ Turnover

• 130 Employees HQ

• 700 Employees Shops

• 7 ICT staff

One Saturday morning …

… “Johan, I hope our disaster recovery plans our OK, because our office and warehouse building is currently going up in flames.”

… Click !

No need for a GPS to find the Veritas

offices today !!!

Getting

there !!!

My office just got re-decorated

Disaster Discovery

A ray of sunshine peeps through the warehouse roof

Disaster Discovery

• Who declares a disaster and how

• Call lists

– Employees

– Suppliers

• Information process

– Who calls who

– Where can people get info

– Disaster web portal

Disaster declaration and notification

• Staff

– Availability

– Redundancy

ICT Staffing

• DR and ICT myopia.

• Meeting space to coordinate the recovery process should be available instantly.

• Equipment !– Telecom

– ICT

– Phone

– Copy/Print

– Fax/Scan

– Catering

Temporary housing

• Coffee anyone ?

Temporary housing

• Print & Copy ?

• In the cloud vs on site infrastructure

ICT Infrastructure

• What about desktop infrastructure ?

– Desktops / Laptops

– Telephone

– Monitors

– VDI

ICT Infrastructure

• Backups

– Accessibility

– Point in time restores

– Validate recoverability

ICT Infrastructure

• Quotes– Companies unable to restore core IT systems

within 48 hours after a disaster, have a two year survival rate of about 30%.

– An untested plan is only a strategy.

– Better to have the business continuity plan and not need it, than to need the plan and not have it.

– The tendency of an event to occur varies inversely with one's preparation for it.

– While no plan can guarantee success, inadequate plans are proven contributors to failure

DR Quotes

• Lessons learned

– DR and BCM too focused on ICT and infrastructure.

– ICT in the cloud greatly enhanced our recovery speed.

– Underestimated impact of the desktop

– Too much paper.

ICT Infrastructure