Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans often fall through the cracks as IT staffs and company executives focus more on fixing problems that crop up and keeping up with competitors in an increasingly nimble global economy.
According to Stephanie Balaouras, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, a company's organisational chart can play a huge role in whether it has a plan. While business continuity plans often fall under the purview of a senior-level executive, DR plans (see "DR in six steps," at left) generally are left to the IT department, which must make a compelling business case to upper management to receive approval to spend staff time and resources on developing a plan.
Who has a plan?
Two-thirds of companies with 1,000 or more employees have a backup site to recover key data should the primary data centre fail, according to Forrester.
"That sounds good until you look at the other side, that 34% of larger companies don't have a backup plan at all," Balaouras said. "A lot of companies cross their fingers and hope for the best."
Of those companies that have a DR plan, 23% don't test at all and 40% test just once a year, according to Forrester.
In need of DR approval
The IT department at House of LaRose, a beverage distributor, had no problem convincing company owners of the need for a formal DR plan, following the failure of the motherboard on its Novell NetWare system in 2004. The incident cost the company thousands in overhead and business losses while waiting for a new one.
"We never had the budget for backup, and, because we hadn't had any problems, no emphasis was put on it," said Dan Brinegar, IT administrator. "When the motherboard went down, we basically couldn't deliver any beer until it was fixed."
Following that isolated but significant event, Brinegar quickly received approval for a three-phase plan to create a backup system, build a redundant site elsewhere within the distributorship and blanket these two with a tape backup system. "If server A goes down, we can move forward to determine the type of crash and scenarios for bringing it back up," Brinegar says. "We can be up and running in four to five hours in the worst case."
Testing pays off
House of LaRose chose FalconStor for its backup systems after exhaustive testing of many products. Brinegar insisted on testing so he could draw lines between vendor claims and the actual performance of products.
"Many vendors will tell you what you want to hear, but only you can determine whether software is or is not a good fit for what you need it to do," Brinegar said. "It's not just about the software, but about the fit of the software and the company that provides it."