Technology and Disaster Recovery

Yesterday, I stumbled across a rather scary statistic: 80% of invocations of a Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity (BC) processes were due to IT hardware failures. That is a scary and what it says to me is that there are many companies out there with a multitude of single points of failure in the IT infrastructure that they have not addressed. This is not perhaps that surprising; removing single points of failure from IT infrastructure usually costs money and it's hard for many CEOs to understand why they should pay for equipment that's just going to sit there idle waiting for a failure to happen.

I met a potential client recently who had invested over £100k on a completely new IT infrastructure. All that money and yet they still had a major single point of failure: Their main server. It was running multiple virtual servers and it sat in the basement of the office that had a history of floods. The cost of buying a small back-up server and sitting it on the 2nd floor of the office paled in to insignificance when compared with the amount of unbillable hours they would accumlate if the main server failed without a backup. I'm very disappointed with whichever company installed the kit in the first place, they should have known better than to agree to implement such a massive single point of failure in a brand new system.

There are 5 simple steps for ensuring your IT is ready for any Disaster:

1. Identify all the systems that enable the company to generate revenue
2. Analyse what type of risks you have within those systems and the consequences for the company should that risk become a reality
3. Evaluate your analysis and decide what to do, either remove the risks (buy more technology) or you decide to do nothing and leave the risk in place, but acknowledge they exist.
4. Document everything that you've found out and decided to do.
5. Maintain what you've achieved. This is not a one-off task, it needs to be continued and kept up to date.

Going through this process and producing a plan should at least make sure you're fully aware of your potential risk areas and be able to make prudent decisions on where to spend money and remove the single points of failure.

IT now plays a critical supporting role in generating revenue in the majority of companies. GreenBOLD provide a service implementing and managing DR & BC plans for companies. If you'd like to ensure your systems are always stable and available, get in touch.