Minor Feature
Planning for the worst
06-10-2000
by Elaine Larkin
Not having a disaster recovery plan in place is like not wearing a seatbelt in a car. It's unacceptable, a game of Russian roulette that can ricochet, affecting others and ruining a business.
Business continuity, as it's also known, is a must for any company and for organisations like financial institutions continuity plans are actually required by regulations.
The facts of the matter are clear: most companies who suffer a major business interruption not covered by an adequate business continuity plan cease trading within 18 months of the event, according to a 1998 Arthur Andersen
report. And according to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce 43 percent of all business that suffer a major fire never resume operation; of those that resume trading 28 percent are out of business within three years.
In the US companies don't pass their audit if they don't have a business continuity plan that works. A frequent problem in Ireland, according to Alan Whelan, Sales Manager with Synstar, is that companies have a business continuity
plan sitting on a shelf gathering dust for a few years. But this attitude, he thinks, is changing.
Whelan said factors like improvements in telecommunications and bandwidth are also having an effect - now companies can now look at having data images off-site. In the past financial institutions and other data-critical enterprises used off-site storage for their data by putting their own
fibre optic lines in place and backing them up daily. Nowadays a broadband network means these backups can be far more frequent with the advantage of on-site backups as well as the security of off-site data storage.
"The more forward thinking companies are doing it as a matter of course because it's good common business sense," Whelan said. Business continuity such as data storage recovery protects brand images and customer loyalty, but can also be a commercial advantage -- sometimes requirements to a tender require that a continuity plan be in place.
CAPTURING DATA IN REAL TIME
Mirroring data on another computer in the same offices is no longer enough. Every transaction needs to be recorded offsite. Customers can now be linked over fibre to offsite data capture centres, so that companies' databases are backed up not just at the end of every day, but constantly.
Actual second by second back-ups or live mirroring, Whelan believes, are not possible. He said that there is always going to be a time lapse, no matter how minuscule and that the mirroring happens more like minute by minute. "To look at absolute up to the latest transactions is nigh on impossible because there is a processing time involved."
Business continuity started out as disaster recovery - which was very much computer focused. Companies just wanted a replacement computer if something happened to the one they had. Businesses then realised that other facilities
were also important, such as power and communications. "Historically people looked at it as
fires, bombs, floods but increasingly they have to think of other things like their Internet services for example," said Whelan.
There haven't been any large scale invocations of a service in Ireland. But as Whelan points out, that doesn't mean there isn't a need for data storage recovery here. He
believes it is vital for a company to have minimum interruption as opposed to recovering from a disaster. "It's to build in resilience into your provision of business," he said.
Elaine Larkin is at elaine@electricnews.net
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