Disaster Recovery Services and the Business Impact Analysis

- Autumn Salama, Latisys Senior Manager of Solutions, says:

If you ask most CIOs they will tell you they have a disaster recovery (DR) plan for their organization. The unfortunate reality is that most DR plans are incomplete, untested and built without a true understanding of the impact of each component of the business.

The first and most important aspect of any DR plan is a Business Impact Analysis. The purpose is to identify all of the IT systems that support the business processes and to quantify the impact of unavailability of the systems whether it be delayed or lost income, regulatory fines, breached contractual obligations or other intangible effects. This analysis should allow for those developing the recovery plan to take into account the true criticality of each system and determine recovery time and recovery point objectives that are realistic and meet the needs of the business.

Any solution established for recovering from a disaster should not only be designed to meet the recovery time and recovery point objectives but should be tested to ensure that these objectives are in fact attainable. Many organizations may do perform a simulated test when the plan is initially developed but most organizations never execute a full test. Another challenge presented with a DR plan is the dynamic nature of an IT environment. The systems that support a business are often changing and with those changes come potential complications in recovering from a disaster. The more dynamic the environment the more frequently a test of the DR plan needs to be executed.

Enterprises looking to deploy DR should look for national Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform providers with a wide range of DR services meeting a wide range of recovery time and recovery point objectives. Latisys recently launched a variety of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offerings and specializes in helping organizations decipher the criticality of systems and designs solutions that are tested and validated on a regular basis to meet the recovery needs of their business.