Short Memories in Business and a Lack of Disaster Recovery Can Carry Significant Costs

I was working in the Disaster Recovery industry when the Twin Towers came down during 9\11. I remember being horrified! The following few weeks were a frenzy of activity for the industry. Companies without a Disaster Recovery contract or plan went out to market to get coverage, some did it properly completing a business impact analysis, taking the time to understand their RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) and aligning the services they procured accordingly. Other’s bought the cheapest option available just to get a DR “tick in the box”, but surprisingly most did nothing!! Even after the atrocity they decided it was too much work and they didn’t have the time to invest. The hype around 9/11 started to fade and while those individuals lost were not forgotten the business impact was.

When I saw these stats on a website recently I was amazed to think that some business’ still don’t bother to protect themselves. Did you know:-

• The Hemel Hempstead oil depot explosion cost local firms £70m (Source: East of England Development Agency)
• UK businesses suffer an average of 235 hours a year of system downtime. (Source: Dimension Data)
• Computer related disasters cost British businesses 1.8bn a year (Source: NCC)
• 20% of companies lose more than £1m, 25% lose £250k to £1m, 43% lose £10k to £450k (Source: PWC)
• Less than 10% odds of survival for organisations without a plan (Touce Ross)

It’s not hard and it doesn’t have to be expensive, consider how long your business could cope without your business systems (RTO) and how much data can you afford to lose (RPO). There are a range of options available.

If you need to be up and running in minutes without any loss of data, you will need to consider a High Availability Solution across multiple data centres running platform specific availability software, you don’t even have to buy dedicated hardware to deliver this service today, you could buy into a shared or virtual environment on a utilities based model, so you only pay for what you need.

If you could afford to go back to Friday nights back up following a disaster on a Monday afternoon and actually it didn’t matter if the system wasn’t available until Tuesday lunch time, you are a prime candidate for traditional disaster recovery services.

These are at the extreme end of everyone’s situation and in reality most companies find they need a hybrid of solutions, a combination of these and a few other services positioned mid way between the two usually provide the required coverage.

Justifying the cost can be quite simple in some cases, just by working out the revenue your business generates in a day should be justification enough, but don’t forget to consider lost customers, if they can’t get hold of you, will they remain loyal and wait for you to be back in business or will they go to your competitor. I think we all know the answer to that!!

What history does tell us is that no one can afford to do nothing!!

This article has been created by Sam Dean, Client Director at Blue Chip. Sam can be contacted via info@bluechip.co.uk