Disaster Recovery Plan
Last Modified: Oct 2019
Ethnio COVID-19 Pandemic Response
The COVIS-19 pandemic is having an impact on every aspect of our lives. We hope everyone is adjusting and staying safe during this difficult time—our thoughts are with all those affected.
For the last three years Ethnio has been a fully remote company and our supply chain is highly vetted, so there has been zero impact to our infrastructure and no reduction in services. As Ethnio was one of the first remote research tools to exist, we're doing our best to apply our resources to help all researchers and customers adapt.
High-level Outline
As we all know, some disasters cannot be avoided. However, we have put these high-level safeguards in place to minimize the impact and help protect your research team.
- Physical Facility: remote backups are performed regularly and stored in a different physical location from the main servers. Color and Rimuhosting provide UPS, generators, and real-time monitoring.
- Data Safety: all company information, design, and code management is stored redundantly across several locations.
- Maximum Allowable Recovery Time: 24 hours to resume normal operations.
- Disaster Simulation & Testing: Ethnio conducts this once per quarter.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
We all know that data loss, even on a small scale, can drastically affect research operations and even damage your company’s financial stability.
The first steps in planning recovery from unexpected disasters is to identify the the risks and prioritize the essential functions of the business. These are the functions that would considerably disrupt business operations, and may result in financial loss.
Viruses, hackers, natural disasters, and even user errors can create data loss, but Ethnio has taken action to minimize these and other risks of data loss. Ethnio’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 24 hours to resume normal operations in the event of a disaster, with the goal of a full data restoration due to our robust data center security.
Taking into account risk attributes such as time of the day, likelihood, and advanced warning, Ethnio has used the following disruption scenarios to guide our BIA:
- Physical damage to data center(s) to the point of outage.
- Damage to servers themselves.
- Power failure to both redundant TierPoint UPS & main power.
- Damage to, loss or corruption of information technology including voice and data. • communications, servers, computers, operating systems, applications, and data.
- Multiple essential employee availability failure.
Ethnio vs Other SaaS Providers
This table below shows the disaster recovery and business continuity planning performed by Ethnio versus the percent of other SaaS companies performing the same planning.
| Security Description | Performed by Ethnio | % of Other SaaS Companies |
|---|---|---|
| Maintains production backup environments in geographically and geologically distinct areas | 79.4 % | |
| Encrypted backups are performed nightly | 47.3% |
Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
Ethnio has been designed to be recoverable and robust with physically separated servers.
The main data center runs a Cisco networking environment. This data center is staffed 24/7, and includes multiple layers of security & authentication; including card key, PIN, & biometric measures.
As an additional safeguard to the main center, Ethnio uses a warm mirror up-to-the-second data center to support a speedy recovery of critical data.
Moreover, because we know it’s important to store data in geographically-diverse locations, Ethnio has DB backups off-site that use the same encryption as the primary hosts (more info here bakop.com.) This helps prevent against universally recognized events such as earthquakes, fires, and floods.
All in all, these measures help to ensure your data is protected to the highest level and we are able to function quickly in the event of a potential disaster.