While disaster recovery strategies are intrinsic to the enterprise risk efforts of all organisations, disaster strategies should only be considered as viable options in the truly unforeseen cases such as actual disasters, and not minor hiccups.
That said, however, it seems the majority of IT managers and CIOs don`t think that way, at least in the South African market.
"The hint is right there in the `disaster` part of the term `disaster recovery`," says Dick Sharod, country manager for Stratus South Africa. "Disaster recovery is so named because of its applicability to a disaster, such as a flood, fire or an event resembling the 11 September terrorist attacks," he says.
Instead of considering disaster recovery as a tactic that is employed when all else fails, many IT departments tend to rely on their disaster recovery planning as a good solution to issues that aren`t necessarily on the `disaster` scale, such as a hardware failure, a badly written device driver, or data corruption.
"This is suicide," Sharod adds. "By relying on their disaster recovery plans to bail them out of minor challenges, many companies are setting themselves up for a fall," he says.
"You expect an unforeseen disaster to lead to some form of downtime," he continues. "The more effective your disaster recovery plan, the better your chances of minimising your downtime in the event of an actual disaster."
"However, you shouldn`t tolerate downtime due to a trivial failure. In fact, I would venture that there`s absolutely no excuse for a system going down today, barring of course an actual disaster.
"CIOs and IT managers need to adjust their definition of `disaster`. There is more than enough technology available in the market capable of eliminating downtime," he says.
Sharod points out that it is far simpler to plan not to fail. "Having a disaster recovery plan is incredibly important, but it shouldn`t overshadow the continuous availability plan." "Numerous technologies and robust system architectures exist to safeguard against the `more routine` outages, and let`s face it, even the most sound disaster recovery or business continuity plan often still results in some form of downtime. A vital part of averting enterprise risk is for IT managers to do everything in their power to ensure the organisation`s IT system doesn`t go down in the first place," Sharod opines.
Sharod says his argument becomes far more compelling the moment the IT department sits down with the business heads and calculates the cost of each minute of downtime.
"For many customers, being down for even a few minutes a day could mean the loss of millions of rands of revenue, and that`s not even considering the damage to future business and their brand such an event could inflict. Then there are the problems involved with the physical aspects of using a secondary site for disaster recovery, such as having your information and support staff split between two sites," he says.
When you consider the complexity of a disaster management system and the high cost of every minute of downtime, most organisations will find the cost and simplicity of a continuous availability solution incredibly attractive.
"In fact, the cost of a purpose-built continuous availability solution today, by comparison to what it cost five years ago, is truly fractional. If you add into the mix that this fraction of the cost five years ago buys you twice the capabilities today, it`s a no-brainer," he concludes.
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