2012 IT Disaster Recovery Solutions
The Most Catastrophic Reason Indianapolis Businesses Need Disaster Preparedness & Recovery Plans is Usually the Most Overlooked
By Robert J. AlcornCOO, n|Frame, Inc.Download this article! |
 |
Indianapolis technology disaster recovery expert, Robert J. Alcorn, chief operating officer of n|Frame, warns local businesses that the most common and potentially devastating threat of operational catastrophe is much closer to home than most people realize.
The word “disaster” makes most of us think of the catastrophic damage caused by hurricanes, wild fires, earthquakes and tornados. Certainly, these violent and unpredictable natural disasters are devastating to businesses and the community at-large, but it is the presence of a quietly lurking threat that poses a constant risk of total operational shut-down every single day.
A Forrester Research study revealed that 27% of companies declared at least one disaster during the past five years. Fortunately, these businesses did not suffer the devastation of any acts of God, war or nature. Surprisingly, the culprit was much more common than any one would assume. Nearly half of all the declared disasters reported were due to power failures.
While it’s almost unthinkable to believe that a business literally can be brought to its knees by something as simple as a power failure, it does make sense. While companies are busy shoring up all of the gaping corporate vulnerabilities (like physical or virtual security and competitive espionage), it is easy to overlook the most basic.
Power failure disasters hit close to home and are more common and more frequent than you’d like to believe. And, right now, Indianapolis is in the eye of the perfect storm. Midwest winters have all of the right ingredients for business disaster and operational downtime: freezing cold temperatures, damaging ice storms and impassable snow. Over the next several months, local businesses and workers will be overloading our area power grids to stay warm, braving dangerous roads to get to and from work and fighting the element to keep infrastructure operating. Typically, in the battle between man and nature, the relentless trio of snow, ice and wind win to bring down power lines and shut down highways. When the northeast was hit by an early snowstorm in late October, 1.8 million businesses and homes were in the dark, many for up to an entire week. The culprit: wide sweeping power outages.
Downtime such as this costs the average small-to-medium size business a whopping $12,500/day, according to Symantec’s 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey. This statistic highlights just how vulnerable corporate systems are to the lowest-tech component of the entire IT infrastructure: power.
Even in Indianapolis, disaster preparedness, backup and recovery plans are necessary to protect the enterprise, and therefore, long-term revenue sustainability, from commonplace threats such as power failures.
The best approach to disaster recovery for IT and telecommunication systems is to move physical infrastructure assets (equipment and hardware) from the company’s local site into an offsite, secure, controlled facility designed to withstand a variety of regional-specific disaster scenarios. A virtual or cloud-based IT environment further mitigates the risk of catastrophic business downtime by creating a remote gateway into the organization’s critical systems, network, hosted applications and live data when workers cannot physically access their primary job site.
Don’t wait until it’s too late. Now is the time to put a 2012 business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. Snow and ice may affect the roads, but they don’t have to disrupt your business.
- Communicate, educate and train your staff and extended team on proper emergency procedures.
- Assign primary and secondary resources to specific roles in the disaster recovery plan.
- Document emergency operational procedures.
- Create a backup plan that addresses each critical operational asset.
- Determine which operational assets can and should be moved offsite to a more secure location.
- Identify all of the single points of operational failure in your organization (e.g. physical worksite, powerlines, telecommunication service, Internet access, IT hardware and network access).
With winter weather banging on our doors, here are some immediate steps you can take to protect your business against the risk of power failure disasters:
While virtualization technology is not a new approach, many companies in Indianapolis are just starting to adopt cloud computing as part of a larger disaster preparedness, backup and recovery strategy. By virtualizing as many corporate communication systems as possible, including servers, operating systems, software application hosting, data storage and even telecommunication systems (such as voice over Internet protocol or VoIP), the operational nerve center is not as vulnerable to environmental and physical threats, and workers can continue to function from anywhere, even home.
Use the form to the right to schedule a tour of n|Frame’s Indianapolis data center and drive-time recovery center today!