During his discussion in his posting “Business Community Planning” Alvin described the advantages and importance of devising a Business Community Planning or BCP. According to him it is a process which helps a business organization to stay operational and in business in case of any disaster or system failure. He gave an example of an industrial lightning components manufacturer Xenon Engineering currently developing a new enterprise application based on DBMS.The company’s success depends of the core information regarding the customization of its products according to the customer demand. In order to prevent the loss of critical information XE needs an effective BCP in order to keep the essential functions of the company in running in case of disaster or application failure. Alvin primarily emphasized on complete support of the company’s management during organizing the BCP development team.
The team members should be from various departments of the organization.According to Alvin the team should be consist of a Chairman, who is overall responsible of the BCP development, a vice chairman as a backup, crisis coordinator to deal with public and media, team secretary to help documentation of meetings and decided policies and procedures, IT personnel, Legal personnel, security and auditing officer and direct end user from the respective business department. The key decisions in formulation BCP includes determination of objectives beforehand, assessment of possible risks and their impacts, maximum downtime determination and rehearsing BCP on yearly basis.According to Alvin BCP gives the businesses to recover faster and with less damage.
In his posting “System Backup” Alvin explains his system backup strategies. His company uses MS SQL 2000 & 2005. They have set the strategy of backing up transactional data every 2 hourly and a full backup at midnight. The backup is then stored in a tape drive and a network storage drive. The tape media will be offsite for BCP purposes.
All the servers are attached to SAN with their own power redundancy unit.In this case the management has agreed to lose data up to 2hrs in case of database corruption and up to one day in case of hardware failure. In his posting “Database Processing and Storage Efficiency” advised that despite the cost reduction of storage devices, it is advisable not to store unnecessary data as it will reduce output efficiency. According to him data processing efficiency can only be achieved during database designing. The chief concerning areas where problems may arise are usage of derived fields where calculated value will not become part of the record hence requiring less storage.Disk input & output should be minimized as possible.
Normalization is another important concern regarding data integrity. RAID technology is considered the most cost effective way for storage solutions, but it also reduces storage processing efficiency. Primary keys and use of indexes may also boost performance. Avoiding usage of Null value is also necessary. Use of Stored Procedure will also help increase efficiency. Using correct variable type for data storing is necessary for e.
g. integer for telephone numbers. The tables must be created on only when necessary and they must not be too few also.According to Alvin the physical design of the Database is extremely important regarding the efficiency of the database processing. Key Learning Points of Jeremiah: In his posting “Business Continuity Planning” Jeremiah has explained in detail why a BCP is necessary for XE and what necessary steps should be taken in formulating a proper BCP.
According to him because XE heavily relies on these databases it is essential to formulate a BCP. Creating and maintaining a BCP will ensure XE that its core operations are working during and after any disaster and failure.In order to organize a BCP team XE should first conduct business impact analysis to establish most crucial system and effect of their disruption on the company. This may also help them identify the departments which may constitute the team.
The team will have a senior manager to ensure senior management support and direction as well as appropriate funding, a coordinator who will clarify roles of different members etc, XE security officer and XE Chief Information Officer to coordinate with the IT Specialists of the company.The key decisions include indentifying core services and provisions required to ensure their operation continuity, crucial services priority ranking and maximum downtime period, identify supporting services and functions of revenue generating delivery services, estimate loss because of loosing customer confidence, reputation and competitiveness, identify internal and external dependencies of core services, feasibility of BCP support from the company and funding options, BCP plan testing schedule and possibilities, merits and demerits of outsourcing BCP.In his posting “System Backup” Jeremiah said that in the ministry of planning where he works, they have four types of backups. Database backups are done 9. 00 AM every morning. The reason behind this is the attendance tracking system, which requires every employee to check in before 9.
00 AM and is later used to compute the salaries. Another reason is the mail tracking system. The second backup is a weekly backup in which the IT department only does backup of employees folder on the network server if the content are changed. The third backup is the system backup done twice a month.The fourth backup is the complete backup done every last Thursday of the each month and stored in tape media. Laptop users normally take care of their own backup or IT department backup their data on tape drives.
In his posting “Database Processing and Storage Efficiency” Jeremiah explains the tradeoffs between database processing and storage efficiency by using the scenario of the database of his own office, where he works. He said that in the ministry of planning there is a personal data storage system which uses P_NO as the primary key and DEPT_NO as the foreign key in order to entity integrity and deferential integrity.The records are sorted department wise and indexed by job group. Every year new employees are hired while the others leave the organization. The office keeps the record of absconding employee for one year, while of the resigning employee for three months.
Records of terminally ill employees are kept for six months. Employees get 10% increment annually and every third year are promoted to a higher job scale. Employee’s salary related data is stored in his earnings table every month. The given scenario gave the conclusions that the personal data base was normalized but on the expense of data processing as this resulted in too many small tables.But denormalization may result in great loss of personal data.
The database is sorted by department and indexed on job-group which though increases processing but requires large amount of storage. Complete removal of deleted data requires system reload which is seldom done resulting in unnecessary large database and reduced performance. Other factors may include type of processors, amount of memory, network speed and number of concurrent users. My Key Contribution: In the modern world of tough competition any business organization may only survive by providing undisrupted services to its customers.This requires uninterrupted operation of relevant services regardless of calamities, disasters and failures.
BCP is thus essential for every business organization. Same is the case of Xenon Engineering. Their heavy reliance on computers and databases requires formulating a proper BCP. The BCP establishing requires a team which should have direct support from senior management, coordinator which security department and IT department. All the core services must be identified and their minimum tolerable shut down time should be specified.Outsourcing the BCP is also a feasible option which will save tremendous amount of time and resources on other creative issues.
In our company data backup is normally done on daily, weekly and monthly basis. For daily backup we use external hard drives and networked drives like SAN. Weekly and monthly backup is usually done on external hard drives and tape drives and is sent to a location outside the office’s premises. It is practically impossible to both achieve maximum data processing efficiency and data storage efficiency.Hence a tradeoff between them is necessary. Today the reduce pricing has made the storage efficiency a lesser concern for small and medium sized businesses which does not have large databases.
But for large enterprises it still counts. The tradeoff is usually achieved during the designing phase of any database system. The first and the last postings of Alvin were really helpful for me to understand both BCP and data processing and storage efficiency. On the other hand the 2nd and 3rd posting of Jeremiah was of much help as they were more specific and to the point.
