So Was a Business Disaster Averted?
Posted by Len Diana on Tue, Aug 30, 2011 @ 02:39 PM
So you’ve survived the wind and rain of Irene. Maybe you didn’t have power at your home or business during Sunday or Monday. How many productive hours of work did you lose? Are you now finally thinking about disaster recovery and business continuity? Wikipedia has defined disaster recovery as the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity. While business continuity involves planning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning in the midst of disruptive events, disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems that support business functions. So were you prepared for this past weekend?
This hurricane hopefully got most owner’s/president’s thinking about what would’ve happened “if”. Many IT managers have been trying to prepare for this type of scenario for years. Just in New England on Monday over half a million people were without power. You didn’t hear the news talk about businesses that had lost power. They didn’t have access maybe to email, internet, or phones. Some allowed employees to work from home but maybe they didn’t have power either. Lost employee productivity, inability to talk with customers, lost sales are all serious problems to have in a struggling economy. Did these businesses have off site backups of critical data? Was there enough power for critical network devices? Would a hosted email service make sense? In a post by a former colleague he sites this frightening statistic, “It is estimated that most large companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning, with the aim of avoiding larger losses in the event that the business cannot continue to function due to loss of IT infrastructure and data. Of companies that had a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term.” Many of us were fine after Irene but there are those that will be the 94% that are gone within the next 2 years because they didn’t have a plan in place. If you’re a small to medium size business, you’re working too hard to be one of the 6% survivors. If you had a disaster recovery plan, did it work?
