THE EDGE f there are no effective and preventive recovery

How disasters affect organisations and data

The cost of downtime for business can be divided into tangible and intangible costs . Tangible costs directly result from the interruption of business operations and cause a business to lose revenue and productivity . Intangible costs refer to the loss of prospects due to damage to the business reputation and brand image . Additional costs can be associated with repairing damage in the aftermath of downtime , such as legal fees for compliance in efforts to adhere to data protection regulations .

The cost of downtime should provide a good idea of why high availability is a major focus for businesses of different sizes and across industries nowadays . According to The Uptime Institute ’ s Annual Outages Analysis 2023 , ‘ When outages do occur , they are becoming more expensive , a trend that is likely to continue as dependency on digital services increases . With more than two-thirds of all outages costing more than US $ 100,000 , the business case for investing more in resiliency – and training – is becoming stronger ’.

According to the report , the most common causes of human error-related outages are data centre staff failing to follow procedures ( 47 %) and incorrect staff processes and procedures ( 40 %). Other contributors include in-service issues such as inadequate maintenance . Given these facts , a disaster scenario impacting an organisation at some point seems to be inevitable .

Disaster Recovery vs . Business Continuity

A strong Disaster Recovery ( DR ) plan enables rapid recovery from disasters without severe data loss , downtime or financial damages . For example , in a ransomware attack , recovery options are limited . Either the organisation pays the ransom , reinstalls everything from scratch and loses its data , or restores from a backup . Data backup is a core component of Disaster Recovery , but it is far from the only part .

It is important to highlight a common error here : that the DR plan is often confused with the Business Continuity ( BC ) plan . Both are very different and serve different functions . While some Disaster Recovery concept and metrics commonly overlap and can be confusing , there are important distinctions to be made .

Business Continuity refers to a business ’ ability to maintain core operations during and after a disruptive incident and involves creating a framework that helps an organisation deal with potential threats . Whereas DR refers to restoring access to IT systems and data needed to carry out critical business functions and can be considered as a key component of BC planning . In other words , BC depends on DR processes and measures put in place to regain access to critical systems .

Sergei Serdyuk , VP of Product Management , NAKIVO

While DR and BC both focus on getting operations up and running in minimum time , DR is a more focused process that aims to limit the damage and restore access to data and systems which are crucial to the business to function properly .

System availability : RTO and RPO

One cannot explore DR planning without considering system availability . System availability refers to the system being operational and accessible to users at any given moment , including planned downtime for maintenance . Availability is measured as a percentage of uptime and is usually in the high nines , such as fivenines ( five minutes of downtime per year ).

The most critical metrics with regard to system availability are RTO and RPO .

RTO ( recovery time objective ) specifies the target amount of time that systems can be unavailable before full recovery . The lower the RTO , the better . Should this time be exceeded during a disruption , it means the organisation is starting to suffer losses . www . intelligentdatacentres . com

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