Tuesday, November 26, 2013

RPO and RTO




RTO = Recovery Time Objective tells how quickly you  will able to resume the normal operations back by connecting users to the data. This measurement is called RTO.

RPO =  Recovery Point Objective describes the point until which data will be recovered when a disaster strikes. Generally the time between last backup and the event.  It tells us how fresh or stale the data is.



These terminologies mostly are pertain to DR (Disaster Recovery) or backup solution. These measurements are mainly based on two things:

  1. The expected loss to the business with the objective. 
  2. The cost of achieving the objective.


Friday, November 1, 2013

Maintanace Calander for IT Operations




Problem Statement:      Multiple maintenance(s)  gives us tough time towards our  availability ,  better manageability and eventually improper resource alignment. 


Trying to solve:    Better communication, better visibility.   With visibility rest will follow.

What we want to Solve:
  1. Because emails aren't just letters anymore, they're tasks.. Specially in Operations.
  2. YOU might have been in the original email BUT got missed in the calendar invite by maintenance driver
  3. We need a ‘one stop view to see all the upcoming maintenances.
  4. Easy to analyze (dis)agree/ postpone  these maintenances proposed by multiple team with this single view.
  5. From top of Pyramid view - path from scarcity to visibility and which will facilitate and clarify us the  action part.

How:

Say you already have a kinetic calendar  OR  confluence cal and such…. where multiple teams lists their upcoming maintenance.  But it’s for various teams and looking at multiple places you need to derive your schedule.  Or else someone will have to maintain one of your own which will be nothing but parts/extracts from all those. So will have maintenance overhead.

We can have yet another  tool…  I almost started working on one and stopped by this idea  - 

  1. Let’s have an outlook calendar  for EBS which is shared across all team members.
  2. **Outlook  calendar which will have  “ONLY” maintenance listed.
  3. Forget everyone BUT just add this email id in the calendar invite - maintanace@yourcompany.com
  4. By default it will display with your calendar, OR   you can also Display on a floating TV Screen extended in your teams work area.

What we need:

We are proposing an email id which will give us a calendar also:  maintanace@yourcompany.com
We will  use  JUST  the calendar  part of this mailbox and all of us have a  shared view.



Security:

We will see if sending  email from this id can be restricted ,  if NOT possible we will put strict security disclaimer for this email id. I guess it is possible.
Everyone should have permission to have shared access that calendar.


Enforcement:

If someone is  calling a maintenance, AND any of your  entity is involved ( which attracts risk or needs your attention)  , please  just have this email id included in the calendar invite.  That’s it!! 

Even If someone missed,     one of us just can forward the invite so that it gets listed in the calendar.

Q & Comments:

How does it sound??  

  
-DK



RCA - Root Cause Analysis

An important step in finding the root causes of issues or occurrences that happen within a system or organization is root cause analysis (RC...