Myth-Busting the
Obstacles to Disaster
Recovery Planning
By MIKE DENAPOLI
Until recently, obstacles such as cost, “low-risk” perception, limited staff, and lack of technical knowledge have stymied disaster recovery (DR) planning for many businesses. While these con- cerns may have been valid reasons to neglect DR planning five years ago, technological advance- ments are now changing this scenario. Today, for most businesses, DR planning is not only affordable
but essential. When com-
hour. So when you begin exploring DR plans, first focus on how
your data is directly plugged into lost revenue and consider the
consequences of downtime:
U How much money would your company lose if all transaction data
was lost, whether for the last 12 hours or the last 10 minutes?
U What is the value of the knowledge embedded in emails and
attachments?
U What would it cost to have your engineers recreate hours of work?
U How much vision and hard work can you afford to lose?
U What is the cost in employee wages when servers are down?
U How much money is lost when customers can’t buy your products
online or access technical or customer service?
U What regulatory compliance fines do you face if you can’t record and
access data?
U What is your business reputation worth?
Because knowledge of downtime costs is essential for any
business relying on data, there are several online downtime calculators. However, below is a simple formula:
Cost Per Occurrence = (To + Td) x (Hr + Lr)
panies examine
the four myths that have
prevented them from engaging in DR planning
in the past, they are likely to discover that those obstacles are
more myth than reality.
Myth 1: It’s too expensive
Today’s DR plans cost a fraction of what they did a decade
ago. In fact, a DR plan costs a fraction of what the average hour
of downtime costs, which often equates to more than $40,000 per
Td: Time delta to data backup (How long since the last
backup?)
Hr: Hourly rate of personnel (Calculate by monthly expense
per department divided by the number of work hours.)
Lr: Lost revenue per hour (Applies if the department generates profit. A good rule of thumb is three months of profitability
divided by the number of work hours.)
