Building a Manufacturing BDR Plan
In many ways, Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR) plans for manufacturers don’t differ from other organizations. They need to consider continuing operations should a disruption occur, alternative forms of backup and communications, roles and responsibilities, the need for a formal incident response plan, and more.
Perhaps the core of any BDR plan is building around your tolerance for downtime.
“How long are you willing to be down during a disruption before it impacts your operation?” asks Steve Martocchio, partner and Chief Operations Officer at Cooperative Systems.
In this case, there are two points that are key to any BDR plan: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO is about how quickly you can recreate data should an incident occur. RPO is the maximum amount of data—as measured by time—that can be lost after a recovery from a disaster, failure, or comparable event before data loss exceeds what is acceptable to your organization.
“In fact, one of the factors we look at when we’re making a business case for engaging with us as a managed service provider is calculating the impact of downtime,” adds Roy vanNorstrand, Sales Manager at Coopsys. “There are several different ways that we can look at what an hour down might cost in the aggregate. For manufacturing, downtime literally comes down to lost productivity. Every situation is different, but if a line shuts down in manufacturing, you’re dead in the water. People can’t work. That’s true for other types of businesses, too, but downtime is particularly problematic in manufacturing.”
Where Manufacturing Diverges
While the backbone of a manufacturing BDR plan will be backup and tactics geared to maintaining operations or getting them back up to speed quickly, the devil—at least in this sector—is clearly in the details.
“With many industries we work with, there tend to be some baseline technologies,” notes Martocchio. “In healthcare, for example, physicians’ offices tend to have similar types of hardware and software. Certainly, they’re not identical, but the functions are the same. In manufacturing, you tend to have a mix of state-of-the-art machinery with legacy systems that, because of their proprietary function or prohibitive cost, can’t be upgraded. Even if those machines are off-network, we still need to be able to find a way for them to communicate with the rest of the production line and system infrastructure. In the case of a disruption, the need to maintain the data flow is even more critical. So, our manufacturing BDR plans need to take into account things like data location and data machine segmentation. It can get pretty granular.”
The issues break down even further, depending on processes used or what’s being manufactured.
“In a lot of respects, each manufacturing organization is unique,” says vanNorstrand. “Even if they produce the same items, their processes will likely differ. And, while financial services firms tend to have a structure, at least from a hardware standpoint, that’s fairly flat, different manufacturers might have different machine controls in a different place in their network, so a BDR plan has to consider the entire process and supply chain. In addition to the hardware and software, we need to consider all the processes and people involved. Understanding the flow of information is as important as anything else we do in establishing a manufacturing BDR plan.”
One way to think about the complexity of manufacturing infrastructure, he says, is by envisioning it as plumbing. Think of data moving along the many complex twists and turns in a large plumbing system.
“And we need to protect that data wherever it lives in that system as well as ensure operational readiness throughout a technology platform in which components weren’t necessarily meant to communicate with each other,” vanNorstrand.
Connect with us today to learn more about how Cooperative Systems can build a BDR plan for your manufacturing operation.