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Business: Worried about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
What’s the chance that your organization could be hit with a disaster that would bring down the business for an extended period? That’s a question all organization need to ask, but it’s a question that is not always addressed. And that could be a problem.
Disaster recovery refers to bringing a business back on line after having experienced a disruptive event. There are an incredible number of things that might go wrong, anything from servers that go down as a result of an attack from a computer virus to terrorism and to earthquakes and fires. Over the last decade, weather disaster stories from around the world seem to be happening more frequently. The Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters found that over a period of the last 8 years that the average number of disasters per year was 392, causing an average of $102.6 billion in damage for each of those years. In 2009, the economic damage from disasters in the US surpassed $10.8 billion.
Business continuity refers to being able to keep the organization running despite both small and large scale problems. It also tends to be more inclusive than disaster recovery in considering the types of events that should be planned for. For example, business continuity planning should address what might happen if the company lost it’s largest customer or the largest supplier or if key employees were to leave the company. Power outages, weather-related disruptions, and any number of possibilities might be considered, based on the organization, it’s geography and the nature of its business.
The economy has been tough over the last couple of years on many companies, causing many of them to give pause and think more about future scenario planning, especially in the area of business continuity. Forrester Research found that Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) planning has become a top priority for 32 percent of enterprises and 36 percent of SMBs plan to increase overall spending in this area by about 5 percent over the next year.
