Systems Continuity Assessment
A Comprehensive Assessment for the Backup, Restore, Disaster Recovery and Availability of your Mission Critical Data
Whether caused by a hardware crash, a data center mishap, or even a natural disaster; given time, a system failure will occur in your business…count on it. Having the assurance that the data maintained by your system is effectively backed up and can be made available in an expeditious manner is priceless. QUMAS Systems Continuity Assessment evaluates your company’s ability to maintain continuous access to QUMAS data in the event of a business disruption. It reviews business continuity practices and procedures against common and best practices used by QUMAS customers world-wide.
Top Continuity Challenges
- The establishment of a recovery plan that will meet recovery Service Level Agreements for your Mission Critical QUMAS Solutions
- Backup windows are increasing as data volumes multiply, causing increasingly long system shutdowns. In the event of an outage, end-users are denied access to critical operational documents
- Wasted resources backing up data that has not changed since the last backup
- Heavy reliance on Installation Qualifications and/or Change Order processes to manually restore lost or damaged environments
- No confidence or vendor certification that existing Backup/Recovery procedures are reliable
QUMAS Professional Services will work with your Backup, Recovery & Continuity personnel to help address these challenges by analyzing existing backup and recovery environments.
QUMAS Objectives
QUMAS will work closely with your team to:
- Ensure efficient and reliable backup and recovery processes that meet required service levels, protect critical business data and improve IT efficiency for your company
- Remove operational and business risks with faster, more reliable policy-basedbackup and restores
- Mitigate unnecessary and/or redundant data
- Use full back-ups and incremental backups more wisely
- Free up production system space (Online archiving – note: not full off-line archiving )
- Reduce overall continuity costs
- Strengthen ability to manage, automate, and enforce retention policies
- Increase certainty around the reliability of relevant content retrieval
QUMAS Professional Services deploys a 3-phased approach for ensuring an effective Continuity Program.
Phase 1 Discovery, Approx 3 days
A QUMAS Backup and Recovery Specialist will gather information about your existing backup and recovery infrastructure, policies, and processes:
- Review existing data backup requirements
- Review application and data restore requirements/SLA’s
- Review of backup failure/success history
- Conduct a comparative analysis of multiple environments (if applicable)
- Determine time required to perform a backup and amount of downtime (if applicable)
- Review Staff skill set to identify potential knowledge gaps (particularly when dispersed geographically)
Inventory specific equipment in your backup environment using manual and automated data collection techniques
Phase 2 Analysis, Approx 3 days
Analyze data from Phase 1, including financial impact (if required)
- Rate of data accumulation/growth and impact on performance/ cost
- Understand needs of backup information, such as: Legal Discovery, data corruption, hardware failure
Identify any unconventional performance indicators, configurations, or policies
Assist in determining the recommended backup configurations and high-level policies
Final report and executive summary
Phase 3 Findings & Recommendations, Approx 1 day
Present findings in Final Report
Review recommendations for backup configurations, policies, and processes
Identify follow-up steps
- Further, more detailed assessments
- Business impact & justification analysis
- Residency Services
- Near-line back-up strategies
Case Study
Client reported strange errors after a recent restore of a backup. After significant research, it was determined that the last successful backup of data was 9 months old (even though backups were conducted weekly). The customer saw this as a major risk to the business, their products, and their customers. An emergency team from QUMAS Professional Services conducted a detailed assessment and complex rebuild of the data, leveraging partial backups. The end result was successful (QUMAS were able to salvage the situation), but only after a scare to the IT team, and financial cost that could have been avoided. An assessment would have revealed that backup procedures were ineffective and hardware/software were outdated; and as a result, the issue could have been avoided altogether.
If you have any questions, or wish to contact us directly, please contact services@qumas.com.