MODULE - 4

The Business Continuity (BC) Planning Life Cycle is a structured approach that ensures
organizations can effectively prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions. This life
cycle consists of five critical stages, each involving specific activities essential to the
development and sustainability of a robust BC plan. Here's a breakdown of each stage:

1. Establishing Objectives

● Define BC requirements tailored to organizational needs.

● Estimate the scope and budget required to achieve these requirements.
● Form a BC team, incorporating experts from all relevant business areas.
● Draft comprehensive BC policies as guiding principles.

2. Analyzing

● Gather detailed information on data profiles, business processes, and

infrastructure dependencies.
● Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to understand critical processes and
their recovery priorities.
● Perform risk analysis and develop mitigation strategies for critical functions.
● Evaluate options through cost-benefit analysis to select the most feasible solutions.
3. Designing and Developing

● Define team structures and assign roles and responsibilities for emergency
response, damage assessment, and recovery.
● Develop data protection strategies, infrastructure enhancements, and contingency
plans.
● Create detailed emergency response and recovery procedures.

4. Implementing

● Apply risk management strategies, including backup systems, data replication, and
resource management.
● Establish disaster recovery sites for use during major disruptions.
● Implement redundancy in resources to prevent single points of failure.

5. Training, Testing, Assessing, and Maintaining

● Regularly train employees on backup, replication, and emergency response

procedures.
● Test the BC plan under simulated disaster scenarios to identify limitations.
● Assess recovery processes and performance metrics.
● Continuously update the BC plan to reflect organizational changes and insights from
tests.

10.1 Purpose of Backups

Backups are essential for ensuring data availability and business continuity. They serve
three primary purposes:

10.1.1 Disaster Recovery

● Backups provide the foundation for restoring data at an alternate site in case the
primary site is incapacitated due to a disaster.
● Organizations determine backup strategies based on Recovery Point Objective
(RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements.
○ Tape-based backups involve shipping tapes to an offsite location for retrieval
and restoration at the disaster recovery site.
○ Remote replication ensures real-time or near-real-time data replication to a
disaster recovery site, enabling faster recovery.
● Remote replication is particularly useful for businesses with stringent RPO and RTO
needs.

10.1.2 Operational Recovery

● Backups help recover from data loss or corruption caused by accidental deletions or
errors during routine operations.
 ● Most recovery requests in organizations fall under this category, such as restoring
deleted emails or corrupted files.

10.1.3 Archival

● Backups also serve archival purposes for long-term data preservation.

○ Content Addressed Storage (CAS) is the preferred solution for archives in
larger organizations.
○ Small and medium enterprises still rely on traditional backups to meet
regulatory requirements for preserving transaction records, emails, and other
business documents.

10.3 Backup Granularity

Backup granularity defines the scope and depth of the backup process and depends on
business needs, RPO, and RTO requirements. The three levels of backup granularity are:

Full Backup

● Captures all data from the production environment.

● Advantages:
○ Fastest recovery as all data resides in a single repository.
● Disadvantages:
○ Requires significant storage space.
○ Time-consuming to perform.

Incremental Backup

● Captures only the data that has changed since the last backup (full or incremental).
 ● Advantages:
○ Fast to execute and uses minimal storage.
● Disadvantages:
○ Restoring requires the last full backup and all subsequent incremental
backups, which can be time-intensive.

Cumulative (Differential) Backup

● Captures all changes since the last full backup.

● Advantages:
○ Faster to restore than incremental backups because only the full backup and
the most recent cumulative backup are needed.
● Disadvantages:
○ Requires more storage and time than incremental backups.

Restoration Process

The restoration process depends on the backup granularity:

1. Full Backup Restoration:

○ Simple, as all required data is in one repository.
2. Incremental Backup Restoration:
○ Requires restoring the full backup followed by applying all incremental
backups in sequence.
○ Example:
■ Monday: Full backup.
■ Tuesday: Incremental backup of new/modified files (e.g., File 4).
 ■ Wednesday: Incremental backup of modified files (e.g., File 3).
■ Thursday: Incremental backup of new files (e.g., File 5).
■ Friday: Restoration involves the Monday full backup and incremental
backups from Tuesday to Thursday.

Backup in NAS Environments(Question 2)

When dealing with backups in Network-Attached Storage (NAS) environments, specific

methods are used to ensure data safety while minimizing impact on performance. NAS
systems have their own operating systems and file systems to support multiple users and
protocols. Here’s an easy explanation of the key methods:

1. Server-Based Backup:

● In this method, the NAS head (the controller of the NAS system) retrieves the data
from storage.
● The data is sent over the network to the application server, which then processes it
and passes it to a storage node (a part of the backup system).
● The storage node writes the data to the backup device (like a tape or disk).
● Disadvantage: This overloads the network and uses the server's resources, slowing
down the overall system.
2. Serverless Backup:

● Here, the storage node directly accesses the data from the NAS head, bypassing the
application server.
● This eliminates extra data transfer over the network and frees up server resources.
● Advantage: Faster backups and reduced strain on the network compared to the
server-based method.
3. NDMP-Based Backup (Network Data Management Protocol)

NDMP is a protocol designed specifically for backups in NAS systems. It simplifies the
process and reduces the load on servers. There are two main approaches:

1. NDMP 2-Way Backup:

○ Data moves directly between the NAS head and the backup device (e.g., a
disk or tape), minimizing network traffic.
○ Only metadata (information about the data) is sent to the backup server.
○ Limitation: Each NAS device needs its own dedicated backup device, which
limits central control.
 2. NDMP 3-Way Backup:

○ If multiple NAS heads share a backup device, a private network is set up for
them to communicate.
○ The backup data is sent from one NAS head to the backup device, while
metadata and control information are shared over the public network.
○ Advantage: This allows sharing of backup devices among different NAS
heads, reducing hardware requirements.