As you face an increasing burden to meet government regulations, create uninterrupted user experiences, and safeguard against malicious attacks, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) planning is near the forefront of IT strategy and budget. Many organizations have a plan in place for disaster recovery but many factors could impact the effectiveness of an existing plan – is the plan updated each time a new system is brought online; has the plan been tested for recovery and failover; does the plan prioritize mission-critical applications.
Disaster Planning Statistics
- According to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC, “93% of companies that lost their datacenter for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses without data management for this same period filed for bankruptcy immediately.”
- The IMF reduced Japan’s economic growth forecast to 1.4 percent this year from 1.6 percent as a result of the nuclear crisis.
- According to the Ponemon Institute, the probability of an unplanned datacenter outage over a period of 24 months is 95%.
There is a serious disconnect in the way organizations plan for outages – mostly due to 3 common misconceptions regarding disaster recovery.
DR Misconception #1: Most Disasters are Caused by Catastrophic Events
When companies do conduct disaster planning, 90% of business continuity budgets are targeted at catastrophic disasters rather than the more frequently occurring clinical events which include malicious attacks, viruses and more commonly human error. Millions of dollars of quantifiable losses occur due to clinical events.
The chart below details the causes of disasters – a clinical disaster is 3 times more likely to occur than a catastrophic disaster. In fact, 50% of outages turn out to be power or plumbing related.
DR Misconception #2: Direct Costs Constitute Most Outage Costs
During a short analysis time period, direct costs will prove to be substantial affecting productivity, direct revenue and the costs of executing a recovery. Our long-term research shows that a company’s indirect costs are more greatly affected by an outage – in fact, 2/3 of the overall costs of an outage are indirect in nature (see chart below). Examples of indirect costs include corporate reputation, future sales, SLA and compliance payouts, fines, and data loss. In particular to the loss of data, a company has to evaluate the value of the data, the recoverability and the time it will take to conduct the data recovery.
DR Misconception #3: All Disaster Recovery Plans are Created Equal
Certainly for anyone that has been in the disaster recovery planning business for a significant amount of time knows that the history of this industry says that you need to have a recovery plan for the entire organization application and business footprint.
We’ve found through our research and as indicated in the Forrester chart below, that the efforts of executing a recovery plan are spread equally across all three classes of applications – a mission-critical application has the same focus as a non-critical application. That type of planning is flawed – mission-critical, or bet-the-business applications, warrant a higher degree of focus and a more aggressive disaster recovery plan than a typical application.
With regards to testing, the costs associated with testing result in organizations conducting less tests and less testing substantially increases the data integrity risks. Gartner research shows that almost 50% of all tape restores fail – when an organization reduces their testing the likelihood of capturing failure is also reduced. Many organizations never perform a recovery from a test. This disregard for testing poses significant risks for companies using traditional recovery methods for their disaster recovery planning.
Considering these three misconceptions, does your organization have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place? Our next blog post will assist you in evaluating your disaster preparedness – stay tuned.
Hosting.com takes a consultative approach in assisting you with disaster preparedness. We also recognize that you require affordable and reliable BCDR solution to meet your budgetary and business requirements. We offer recovery solutions at a fraction of the cost compared to in-house and hot-site solutions with varying options of recovery time and recovery point objectives. View the Hosting.com Recovery Solutions.
Join our Cloud Replication Webinar on August 24 to learn how you can enable a cost-effective DR plan by combining the automation capabilities and simplistic replication provided through VMware with the inherent availability and redundancy offered through the Hosting.com Cloud.
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