IS CONTINGENCY PLANNING A LUXURY OR A NECESSITY?

Just do a quick calculation; what percentage of your staff can continue to perform their daily jobs without access to your IT systems? What will be the impact to your customers if your systems are down? How many orders will you lose? What is the cost to the business?

Even as a cursory calculation, the impact to the business of a full system failure or even a single application being unavailable is certainly greater than you expected. Now multiply this by a few days, a week, or even a few weeks and you can see the risk that your business is taking.

So why do many organisations leave contingency planning to chance? More often than not the perceived costs are seen as prohibitive and a luxury that many of us cannot afford. This however, is not necessarily the case. Perceptions of high costs stem from the all encompassing Disaster Recovery solutions, where servers, applications, data centres and even whole workplace environments, are duplicated by a DR provider just in case one day they are needed.

Whereas in some environments such levels of contingency provisioning are necessary, there are many smaller steps that an organisation can take to reduce the risk of IT failure and its impact on the business.

Data – to protect against physical loss or loss of access to vital data there are many steps that you can take ranging from increasing the resilience of your storage devices, having a robust and validated back-up procedure, through to data being replicated over multiple geographic locations.

Applications – access to business-critical applications can be lost for considerable periods of time through something as simple as a server failure. It is important you understand the risk to each application and then look at the alternatives, many of which are low cost, to reduce this risk, such as hardware resilience options, application virtualisation, roll-back environments, etc.

Network – any IT network is only as reliable as its weakest link and even if your data and applications are available, these are rendered worthless if users are unable to access them through a network failure. Network resilience should be built into your network design and there are many ways to ensure your network is robust and has no single business critical point of failure.

Data Centre – whereas there is a lot you can do to fortify and ensure high availability of your data centre, including multiple power supplies, battery back-ups, etc, there still exists the risk that through situations outside of your control such as fire, evacuation, etc, your data centre can become inaccessible. This is where a physical DR contract can help, but also other options such as co-location of devices, virtualisation of applications, etc.

b2Lateral has helped many of our clients to access risk and plan for business continuity. Our business continuity team are well versed in all of the options that are available and can help you assess, plan and implement the most appropriate solutions. To find out more click here.