Preventing Disasters

I talk with a lot of CIO’s and IT Directors around the US about how they go about protecting their firms from the risks of downtime . We usually cover topics such as:

• RTO and RPO,
• SLAs,
• Clouds,
• Budgets,
• Data,
• Storage, etc.

Recently, the topic has turned more from a bits and bytes discussion into one focused on the reality of keeping their users working and “preventing disasters.”

I realize that “preventing disasters” may seem like an impossibility, and from the traditional view of a disaster (earthquake, tornado, water leak, etc), you would be right. But what if you think in terms of keeping your users working with their content (documents, emails, appointments) so that your customers continue to come to you for their needs? When you are successful, you avoid the bigger more personal disaster: being forced out of business by loss of the business.

One firm has been using tapes for a long time, backing up nightly, and rigorously moving their data offsite every day. They’ve previously refused to invest any money for anything more because up to that point, they “haven’t needed” anything better.

At the same time, the IT Manager said that to recover from loss would take:

• 1 day to recover a lost file
• 1 – 2 weeks to recover the site

We then worked what it would cost her firm for this. Based on a $75/hour rate of income for every employee in their firm, for an 8 hour work day, and a 5 day work week, the cost to their firm was:

• $7500/hour
• $60,000/day
• $300,000/week

On top of this lost revenue, the firm would of course have to add the costs for equipment, a facility to put the equipment in, new communication lines, and the time to put this all together. Perhaps another $100,000 – $200,000 or more?

But worse than this, according to Strategic Research Institute, organizations that aren’t able to resume operations within ten days of a disaster are not likely to survive. The University of Texas reports that 94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive; 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.

All of a sudden the management of this firm is thinking that the costs of not doing more to protect themselves are much worse that the costs of providing adequate insurance in a true Disaster Recovery plan.

I realize that for some firms, the costs that I mention above would not be insurmountable, and might even seem reasonably affordable. Then again, a SAN replacement alone could be well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there are research reports available that peg the cost of downtime at $85,000 – $90,000 PER HOUR!

The question really is, have you taken a good look at what it would cost you in:

1)      Time to recover? 2)      Cost per hour of lost revenue? 3)      Lost customer confidence for future revenue?

Can you really afford these costs, and would you still be in business even if you could get past the short term costs? Perhaps it’s time you took a look at the cost for you to prevent a disaster.