The ability to re cover lost data and information is particularly important given the current troubled economic circumstances. According to Joe Costello, business development manager at IBM Ireland, organisations know that losing access to business critical information, even for relatively short periods of time, can be fatal.
“Companies both large and small are continuing to improve their business continuity posture, in many different ways,” said Costello.” Managers are recognising that, in these uncertain economic times, it is important to be able to demonstrate to our suppliers and clients that we are prepared somewhat for the unexpected.”
What gets lost Costello said that most people who used IT systems had experienced some kind of system failure at some point.” At one time or another, most technology users have experienced some kind of unexpected outage,” he said.” More often than not, we have just hit alt-control delete and restarted the device, accepting that we have lost some degree of productivity. That is okay if you are playing about on a games console or working on a simple document, but the impact can be quite different if we are talking about an enterprise level application or system.”
The business-critical nature of today's IT systems lead all areas of a company to be concerned with its data recovery capabilities, said Costello.” We have seen a shift in decision making in this area from purely an IT viewpoint, which is what it was around 2000,” he said.
“Today, HR, finance, and senior management are all showing much greater interest in the subject, as business professionals realise that being offline for a prolonged period of time can mean loss of revenue, loss of confidence, and damage to the brand image and reputation.”
Plan elements All companies, from the biggest to the smallest, need to have a data recovery plan which they can implement immediately when their IT systems fail, Costello said.
“People need to identify and prioritise critical business processes and applications, and the data that most affects revenue, customers and business survival,” he said.” They should then come up with a documented plan showing what needs to be done, and by whom, in great detail, in order to recover.
“This should include everything from describing who has the authority to invoke a plan, right down to the individual steps that might need to be taken to recover individual systems. They also should calculate the cost of downtime, which helps to rationalise investment in business continuity and data recovery and security systems.”
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