Infrastructure VII - Disaster Recovery in practice

People still think Disaster Recovery (DR) is important but not necessary, or not cost effective. Many years ago, we proposed the management for replacing the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) in our server room. The management asked us when the power failure occurred last time. Hence I understood that he did not see need for it.

Fonseca (2007) reported that

‘Peltzman said he understands why corporate management puts constraints on disaster recovery spending even though business people are the ones who complain when their systems fail. However, many of his IT brethren are often at odds with business leaders on the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery technology.’

Steven Peltzman who is the CIO of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, has also faced the disagreement with business executives regarding the IT spending on disaster recovery. In fact, many CIOs and business executives have very diverse point of views on Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity (DRBC) in accordance with SunGard’s survey. Harris Interactive Inc. polled 176 corporate executives and 351 IT managers in February and March. The brief results of the survey are listed below.

From the above results, we can see that more likely IT respondents focus on the backend operations rather than the frontend applications. When identifying which systems are essential to safeguard from disaster, business and IT executives are in agreement regarding the top four systems that impact revenue. Both groups identified e-mail, back-office applications, customer service and telecommunications in their list of top five systems that would affect the bottom-line if they were unavailable. That means they have diverse views but also, share some views.

I am an IT specialist and I would very often see only a corner of a picture. To really have successful disaster recovery solutions, we should at least pull all the key decision makers together from all parts of the business such as business development, finance, HR, IT and etc and work out the plan for DR in advance, going through a business impact analysis to define the critical systems and applications so the plan is clearly defined before any interruption occurs.

To be continued

References

Robins B 2007,‘Survey Reveals Limiting IT Downtime Window Major Concern; Business And IT Executives Disagree On Importance Of Disaster Preparedness’, SunGard, <http://www.sungard.com/news/default.aspx?id=2&announceId=844>.

Fonseca B 2007a, ‘IT trying to work with execs on disaster recovery’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 2 May 2007, US viewed 6 September, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=423990>.

Fonseca B 2007b, ‘Survey: Business, IT differ on disaster recovery’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 2 May 2007, US online, viewed 6 September, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=423976>.