As security becomes an increasing challenge for businesses worldwide, maintaining a solid disaster recovery strategy is a key concern -- and ensuring the reliability of a company's BlackBerry environment is particularly crucial.
However, according to Osterman Research analyst Michael Osterman, many companies don't understand the importance of disaster recovery planning until it's too late.
"It's the kind of thing where companies tend to be a little bit reactive -- you tend to get more attention to disaster recovery in the southeast starting June 1st when hurricane season starts... or after a major earthquake in California," Osterman says.
What's more, Osterman says, even for those organizations that have a disaster recovery plan in place, it's rarely as complete or as sophisticated as it could be. "We've asked, 'If your email system went down, how long would it take to come back up?'... and something like a third of companies say they don't know," he says.
And so, Osterman says, the first step in assembling a disaster recovery plan is to determine your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). "What you're trying to define is how much time can you afford not to be up with email -- and then at what point do you need to recover?" he says. "Do you have to capture 100 percent... or could you roll the clock back an hour and start from that point?"
To a large degree, the answer will depend upon the type of services the company offers. "If you're using email for transaction processing, for example, and orders are coming in on a continual basis through email, obviously you're going to have a stricter set of RTO/RPO objectives than if you're just using email for normal communications," Osterman says.
And while it's possible to design and implement your own disaster recovery solution, Osterman says it's far easier -- and far more advisable -- to work with a provider like Marathon, Neverfail or Teneros. "Disaster recovery is not as easy to implement internally as a lot of people might think... so I would definitely recommend going with a company that is an expert in the disaster recovery space," he says.
In selecting a vendor, Osterman says it's key to look for one whose strengths match your needs. "You may find, for example, that mobile is not as high a priority as normal email, because of transaction processing that takes place in the primary email system but doesn't take place in mobile -- or it might be that mobile is more critical if you've got a highly distributed workforce that's on the road most of the time," he says.
And it's particularly crucial, Osterman says, to keep the unique needs of a BlackBerry-enabled workforce in mind. "For a very large proportion of users, the BlackBerry represents the primary way that they check work-related email, so that has to be a critical consideration in any disaster recovery plan," he says.
One good example is the international law firm Dechert LLP, which began using BlackBerry devices back in March of 2000. "They quickly became a big part of our communication culture to the point that, for disaster recovery planning... we realized that not only is email a tier 1 application, but email on our BlackBerrys is a tier 1 application," says company CIO Michael Shannon.
The firm, which currently has about 1,200 BlackBerry smartphones deployed, counts on Neverfail's disaster recovery solution, deployed by Tangoe, to ensure automatic failover between its main servers in Philadelphia and its alternate recovery facility in Princeton, New Jersey. While they've tested the solution thoroughly, Shannon says they're lucky enough not to have had to count on it yet.
For Dechert, Shannon says, the importance of a solid disaster recovery plan can't be overstated. "You can actually lose clients if you're down long enough, because you're not being responsive to your clients' needs," he says.
Similarly, venture capital firm Argo Global Capital turned to Marathon's everRun software to ensure the dependability of mission-critical services like Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Server. "Our global partners and clients are 'always on,' making it critical that our executives have 24x7 access to email and mobile services," says company vice president of administration Kathy Calisi.
Argo worked with Integrated IT Solutions to deploy the Citrix XenServer virtualization platform along with Marathon everRun, providing both scalability and reliability. "When we were presented with the full set of capabilities that would be provided through the integration of XenServer and everRun, we thought that they were too good to be true -- but the deployment was simple," Calisi says.
And everRun, Calisis says, has already had a chance to prove itself. "One of the servers was unavailable because of a NIC failure, but thanks to everRun we never experienced a disruption in service," she says.
