With many organisations treating their Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity strategies as little more than glorified insurance policies, should firms be trying to extract more bang for their BC buck?
In common with death, taxes, and your toast landing buttered side down on the new Axminster, one of life’s few real certainties is that the time things are most likely to go pear shaped for the average business is the moment it lets down its guard.
Forget to back-up your data and everyone knows that the odds on your office falling victim to a random Ebola outbreak or alien attack are slashed by a factor of ten. Allow your Disaster Recovery (DR) policy to lapse and crushing catastrophe is quite certain to follow precisely 3 nanoseconds later.
The problem, of course, is that the reverse is also true. Spend a fortune making certain that all those ready-to-go-at-a-moment’s-notice emergency facilities are watertight and, well, ready-to-go-at-a-moment’s-notice, and you can bet there won’t be so much as a low toner issue to ripple the calm waters.
You, quite sensibly and conscientiously, formulate a formal DR strategy only for it to then figuratively – perhaps even literally – sit on a shelf gathering dust. All that time, money, and effort and yet, ironically, you hope it’s wasted. Indeed, such almost seems to have become a kind of accepted, default attitude for many businesses where DR is concerned, suggests Simon Kelson, MD of cloud-based DR specialist, Atlanta Technology. And an ill-advised one.
“Organisations will pay a lot of money to have an IT disaster recovery policy or procedures in place purely for the eventuality that something goes wrong.” The problem is, he says, that this typically doesn’t add any value to the business; just cost. Hardly ideal given the current obsession with all things ROI related.
The ‘Road to Hell’ approach is also common, according to Tim Dunger of managed disaster recovery firm Plan B DR – wherein a firm substitutes good BC&DR planning for good intentions, rather than have equipment sitting around, at great expense, doing nothing. (And we all know what the road to hell is paved with).
“… it all costs money”, he says, “so doing this as slowly as possible, using the least amount of resource and cash means that companies can achieve almost what they want but without wasting money. No impact on results, job done!”
Read more
