Headlines Provide Reminders on the Importance of Disaster Recovery Planning

By Bob Lund

Speaking Wednesday on ABC TV's Good Morning America, Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said, "We don't always get to pick the next disaster."

Fugate was referring, of course, to the magnitude 5.9 earthquake that shook surprised residents in the Northeast Tuesday, and the strengthening hurricane that could hit the Eastern seaboard this weekend.

For some businesses, these headlines are a wake-up call to get their disaster recovery plans in order. The good news: cloud services make disaster recovery preparations more affordable than ever.

Higher Stakes
Although disaster recovery was once considered an expensive insurance policy for rare but catastrophic events such as earthquakes and hurricanes, enterprises are expanding their plans to address all sources of downtime, including mundane power outages (the number one cause of data loss for small businesses, according to research from Aberdeen Group), application failures (the top cause of data loss for large enterprises), network outages and human error.

And downtime occurs a lot more frequently than most people think: more than two-thirds of large enterprises (69 percent) need to recover data on a weekly or daily basis, Aberdeen Group reports.

With information technology now such a critical part of daily business operations, even brief business disruptions -- which may begin harmlessly, involve only one part of a company, and not appear as a more commonly thought of "disaster" -- can have a significant impact on a business, not to mention its customers. Consider the consequences of a lockbox processor missing bank deposit cut-offs on behalf of its customers. More often than not, it is these "quiet catastrophes" that generate the most significant threat to a business and its brand, according to research from Forrester.

Quite simply, there is less and less tolerance for downtime in a 24x7 economy, warns Forrester's Stephanie Balaouras.

By making disaster recovery planning a priority, operations can protect themselves from disasters big and small. Businesses get it. Improving business continuity and disaster recovery is the No. 1 priority for small and medium-sized businesses and the second-highest priority for large enterprises in 2011, according to research from Forrester. Similarly, AT&T's 2011 business continuity study reveals a trend towards greater emphasis on planning and responding to potential threats.

The problem for many of these companies is that it's hard to make capital investments in disaster recovery capabilities when they are under pressure to cut IT costs.

A New Model
Cloud-based archive and document management services offer a way for businesses to safeguard critical content and protect against a disruption in service, at an affordable, transaction-based price that requires no upfront capital investment or ongoing maintenance contracts. What's more, with some cloud services, businesses can leverage an infrastructure that includes mirrored, geographically dispersed data centers for real-time business continuity and automatic fail-over.

More businesses are recognizing the benefits of incorporating cloud technologies in their disaster recovery planning. A majority (54 percent) of organizations surveyed by AT&T currently use or are considering using cloud services to augment their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. These businesses recognize that cloud services offer tremendous affordability and functionality for business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

The Bottom Line
Businesses can't pick when they'll be impacted by a disaster. But they can control how their organization plans for, and responds to, these events. Using cloud services, such as those for electronic document management, can be a critical element to preventing a disruption in service, protecting client data, and safeguarding the organization's reputation.

Bob Lund is chairman and CEO of eGistics, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based document management solutions. Lund can be reached at 214-256-4610 or via blund@egisticsinc.com.