Guide. Business Continuity

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1 Business Continuity The continuing need for 24/7 availability has seen increased pressures on businesses to beef up their processes and practices to ensure that they can cope with any eventuality. Especially the unexpected! All businesses suffer from some kind of disruption from time to time. This can range from interruptions for individual employees with a broken laptop to events that have an impact on the broader business. These can include systems failures, fire, floods, cyber-attacks, through to acts of god events. Most of us tend to take the optimistic view that it won t happen to us. As a result, many businesses pay insufficient attention to the need for adequate business continuity planning with a view to preventing business downtime. That all changes on the day that disaster strikes. Guide

2 The impact of downtime Downtime is as real as it is costly. Dependent upon the size and type business, downtime costs between 5,800 and 424,000 per hour of downtime! [Source: Aberdeen Group] Whichever way you look at it, unplanned downtime is expensive and in some cases will prove fatal to an unprepared business. The stark reality is that you need to prepare, to prevent and minimise wherever possible, unplanned downtime. There are many factors involved with downtime, and you may be surprised by some of the main causes. Whilst we worry about natural disasters, they only account for 10% of outages. Of the remaining 90%, Systems infrastructure and network outages account for half of all downtime cases, with human error following closely behind at 45%. Have you considered the impacts of unplanned downtime? Some of the questions you and your organisation should be asking include the following: How will our business cope when a major disruption occurs? What are our business-critical activities? What specific risks are they exposed to? How can these risks be quantified and assessed? How can the risks best be managed and mitigated? Guide Business Continuity 2

3 Data Protect it or lose it Any organisation that values its data assets must have a tried and tested plan to keep data secure, regardless of the eventuality. Identifying the various risks within your IT infrastructure will give you many vital pointers as to how you can build meaningful business continuity plans to mitigate your risks. Gaining perspective of IT risk often makes it easier to understand why even the most basic protection measure today can reap financial dividends tomorrow. A recent report [Source: National Computer Security Association] in the US put the cost of recreating lost data in the region of 10,000 per 20MB of sales data, rising sharply to 60,000 for the same volume of engineering data. Bearing in mind most organisations are talking in terms of many GB s, TB s and beyond, the scope for the financial impact of data loss and reconstruction is immense. Causes of data loss are not limited to events such as hardware failure or natural disasters. Cyber-threats are an increasing concerns and IT infrastructures are always vulnerable to the actions of a rogue employee or contractor. Your business continuity solution must protect you against all significant, identifiable risk factors and include a comprehensive use of technologies and procedures. Whilst it is impossible to remove risk completely, a solid business continuity plan will go a long way to reducing the impact of all but the most severe disaster events. Guide Business Continuity 3

4 7 Points of concern in Business Continuity 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the event In the past two years, over 50% of businesses experienced an unforeseen interruption and 81% of these interruptions caused the business to be closed for one or more days Between 60% and 70% of all problems that disrupt businesses are due to human error or internal malfunctions of hardware or software 70% of businesses suffering a major data loss go out of business within a year of the event Only 51% of UK and Republic of Ireland small businesses have a business continuity plan compared to 74% of large businesses 43% of businesses state lack of budget and resource as the biggest challenge to adopting a business continuity plan, followed by 16% citing lack of senior management support 34% of companies fail to test their back-ups, and of those that do, 77% have found back-up failures [Source: Gartner, PWC, Forrester reports] Guide Business Continuity 4

5 Protecting your business W hilst the consequences of the loss of infrastructure and data are widely understood, the SMB sector has lagged behind its enterprise counterpart in developing effective business continuity plans. It would also appear that there s a continued lack of understanding and application of the key differences between data back-up and business continuity. Although very closely related, the two disciplines answer different questions for a business. Data back-up answers the following: Is my data safe and secure, and can I get it back in case of a failure? Business continuity takes the question to a higher level: How quickly can I get my business operating again in case of system failure? Guide Business Continuity 5

6 Planning and taking action on data back-up is a good, essential first step in protecting your business. However, in the event of a failure, ensuring that your data is restored fast enough that your business isn t impacted requires more forethought. As an example, what happens if a server or storage array goes offline or suffers a major component failure (a major cause of data loss) requiring downtime and/or replacement? With data backed up you ll have minimal impact in terms of lost data. However, to enable the business to get back to normal, it may be that the hardware must be repaired or replaced, along with software installs and systems reconfiguration. This is a process that could take hours, or possibly days, dependent on the severity of the outage, and during this time you run the risk of your employees not being able to do their jobs properly, all the while impacting on your customers. Guide Business Continuity 6

7 Planning for business continuity By taking the business continuity route however, you will have considered and planning for these situations. Your planning would have revolved around two key metrics that must underpin an effective business continuity plan: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RPO is the maximum tolerable period of time in which an organisation can be without access to its data due to a disaster. RTO is the duration of time within which a business and its systems must be restored after a disaster to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity. By calculating your desired RTO, you have established the maximum time that you can be without your data before your business starts to suffer. For most businesses this is a small window of time! Additionally, by specifying the RPO, it will become clear as to how you perform back-ups and their frequency because you know how much data, or how many transactions you may lose, all the while calculating the impact on your business. As an example, many business will have an RTO measured in hours and an RPO measured in minutes. It all comes down to what it appropriate for your business and calculating RTO and RPO will help you to understand what data protection or business continuity solution is the right fit for your business. Guide Business Continuity 7

8 Cost of disruption You can determine the cost of any downtime using your RTO and RPO. Below are some points which will help you get to an approximate value: What revenue would be lost as a result of systems failure for one hour? How many employees would be affected if unable to access businesscritical data and what is their average hourly cost? What is the overhead cost of affected employees per hour? Answering the above questions will give you an approximate cost in terms of hard numbers at that point in time. Other effects, such as customer satisfaction and missed business is harder to quantity but worthy of consideration. With many business facing a budget constraints when it comes to establishing business continuity plans, the calculation of an accurate RTO provides powerful financial leverage to overcome fiscal obstacles in acquiring maintaining a business continuity solution. Additionally, the total costs associated with data loss (RPO) show us in clear terms the risks of disaster events. When weighed against the price of a protection strategy in the form of a business continuity solution, the it probably won t happen approach is difficult to justify. Guide Business Continuity 8

9 RPO and RTO Achieving your goals S everal factors come in to play when considering a solution that will deliver your desired RPO and RTO. For the quick restore of data, local back-up works very well. With the back-up media close at hand, it is usually fast and simple to restore data back to its original location. However, should the back-up device become damaged or fails, what happens then? Backing up to and off-site location provides additional peace of mind. Of course, your RPO and RTO goals may be impacted, depending upon not only upon the frequency of your back-up, but also on the speed at which you can access the data. Guide Business Continuity 9

10 At this point, the cloud is obvious solution! In many ways it is. However it s worth keeping in mind that there is an inherent risk with all-cloud back-up as you may have little or no control over bandwidth and as a result, restores can be time-consuming and less than straight-forward. The answer then, may be a hybrid solution. In a hybrid deployment data is initially copied to a local device, giving immediate access and a rapid restore in the event of an issue. Having safely copied your data locally, it is then replicated to the cloud at the most appropriate time. Should there be a disaster event and your local device is inoperable or inaccessible, there is the assurance of the cloud back-up. All this is achieved without the concern of physically removing media off-site. For more information on Business Continuity you can contact us on or at sales@flint-it.com Guide Business Continuity 10

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