| How Much Data Can You Afford to Lose? |
| A successful plan not only eliminates or minimizes the amount of data a business would lose in a disaster, but it also minimizes or eliminates the amount of time it takes to get systems up and running again. When considering how much downtime would cost your business, consider the financial impact of lost customer connections and employee productivity. |
| How many sales will you lose in an hour or a day if your systems are down? How many customers will simply turn to a competitor? What is the hourly or daily cost of lost labor? What are the overtime costs for IT administrators who must work through the night to restore systems? |
| Consider the impact of negative press, negative social media chatter, employee frustration, lost consumer confidence, reputation damage and the potential impact to stock price. |
| In order to minimize downtime and hit the organization’s RTO, a business continuity plan must incorporate a comprehensive backup strategy that protects entire workstations and servers. This is best achieved through image captures that include all data, applications and operating systems. |
| A holistic plan must also feature fast, full restoration capabilities, including the ability to restore images and files to different hardware or bare metal in case the original hardware is destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Fast recovery also depends on having options for storage and restoration, including the ability for instant local and off-site virtualization. It also offers the ability to utilize a hybrid cloud-based model to store entire systems locally and off-site. These options give administrators the ability to manage backup and recovery remotely from a central or alternate location in case a branch office is affected or the central office isn’t accessible. Without the ability to manage branch offices from a central location, administrators have to spend time in transit or rely on non-technical staff to attempt to perform restorations. These options also give the business the ability to adapt replication and storage strategy and infrastructure to their changing needs. |
| Finally, the restoration process is only as reliable as the last test, so administrators must be able to test backups regularly in order to ensure the viability of files and images—otherwise they risk losing time troubleshooting failed restorations. |
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Business continuity isn’t just about data |