Don’t let the recession blind you to disaster

A year after the UK’s worst floods on record, it is clear that businesses, as well as consumers, cannot take potential risks such as natural disasters lightly. In the same week we have seen the Government unveil its National Security Strategy. The news agenda is all about protection and prevention. The question is, has the recession blinded organizations to disaster recovery at a time when it has never been so important? The misconception is that DR should cost the earth, an all encompassing strategy. What it should be seen as is a see-saw, as you spend on DR plans your operational efficiency should benefit. If you are smart you will not be going hell for leather on DR, you will be taking a structured approach, protecting your most crucial assets and tier the rest in order of their mission critical status. This multiple layer approach means that you are protected without breaking the bank. It does however mean you need to make sure you have asked the right questions of your business and are testing regularly!

If disaster strikes and leaves a company’s databases, application servers and web servers out of action, it means a loss of £4,300 an hour. The global results of Symantec’s fifth annual Disaster Recovery survey demonstrates that executive involvement in disaster recovery activities has more than doubled in the past year (up to 67% from 33%) which is great. According to the study, the increase in involvement by executives is likely due to the significant cost of downtime and the importance of IT to business – as proven by the increase in the percentage of applications considered mission critical and their more stringent IT service level requirements.

However, with 93% of companies having to execute on their DR plans, testing has never been such an important issue and it is here where the figures get scary. With the median cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident worldwide standing at $500,000, it is clear that testing has to be a priority, but this year, 35% of respondents reported that they only test their DR plans once a year or less! However, with one in four tests failing, it is clear there is a dramatic need for improvement. Reasons most respondents cited for why organisations they were not testing included:

  • Lack of resources in terms of people’s time (48 percent)
  • Disruption to employees (44 percent)
  • Budget (44 percent)
  • Disruption to customers (40 percent)

 While the research identifies a significant improvement in terms of executive involvement, shorter recovery times and increased successful testing, we are troubled that some areas – including the impact of testing on customers and the backing up of virtual environments – have not improved or have even worsened. Organizations shouldn’t let DR testing cause significant downtime, especially when there are solutions available to address this.

Darren Thomson

June 30, 2009 | Filed Under backup, data-loss, disaster recovery 

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