Optimize the DRP for Business-Critical Analytics

The criticality of analytics is often not clearly defined as it evolves from simply collecting data to generating insights that drive business decisions.
As analytics and its source data continue to grow, it’s also too costly to simply apply the same backup and DR strategy to all of your data.
The compute power required to drive analytics engines presents yet another potentially costly challenge for DR planning.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Business users who depend on analytics are not thinking about DR. IT needs to be proactive to understand when analytics evolve from “nice to have” to critical, before a disaster occurs.
Not all source data and/or generated analytics require the same DR strategy (e.g. depending on to what extent historical data is used to drive analytics and how long it takes to regenerate analytics).
Old decommissioned servers, often used to provision DR sites, may not provide the required performance for analytics engines.

Impact and Result

Start by defining business process workflows to identify when and how analytics are being used and whether analytics can simply be regenerated or deferred.
Evaluate the criticality of source data and generated analytics, based on business requirements, to determine appropriate recovery time and recovery point objectives.
Adapt your existing DRP and DR solution to meet the storage, velocity, and compute requirements for critical analytics.

Optimize the DRP for Business-Critical Analytics Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should optimize the DRP for business-critical analytics, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Optimize the DRP for Business-Critical Analytics – Executive Brief

1. Identify critical analytics in business processes

Discover critical analytics data sets within business processes. Evaluate critical dependencies, single points of failure, and worst-case scenarios for analytics downtime.

2. Determine DR requirements for critical analytics

Document critical analytics data in the Data Criticality Inventory Tool. Define levels of criticality within analytics data, and assess RTO and RPO requirements for each data set.

3. Update the DR solution to meet analytics DR requirements

Leverage Info-Tech’s Executive Presentation Template and the Project Planning and Prioritization Tool to support the implementation of an optimized DR solution.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

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Guided Implementation 1: Identify critical analytics in business processes

Call 1: Evaluate the criticality of each business process as it relates to business impact.
Call 2: Leverage tabletop planning exercises to map out business processes.
Call 3: Determine where the critical business process requires analytics data.

Guided Implementation 2: Determine critical analytics DR requirements

Call 1: Leverage the Data Criticality Inventory Tool to determine current data criticality and location.
Call 2: Review the results of the data criticality assessment.
Call 3: Interpret the results of the data criticality assessment and compare against current DR solution.

Guided Implementation 3: Update the DR solution

Call 1: Leverage the Evaluate Cloud, Co-lo, and In-House DR Deployment Models blueprint to optimize current DR solution.
Call 2: Craft an executive presentation plan to keep executives engaged.
Call 3: Use the Project Planning and Prioritization Tool to document next steps.

Authors

Frank Trovato

David Xu

Contributors

Dr. Bernard A. Jones, Business Continuity Consultant – BC Management/B. Jones BCP Consulting, LLC
Steve Tower, Management Consultant, Disaster Recovery Plans & Assessments
Jack Norris, SVP, Data & Applications, MapR
Three additional contributors who wished to remain anonymous