Symantec has released a report that confirms something I felt for a long time. More organizations suffer from downtime due to system failure than people tend to believe.
Interestingly, there is a gap between the downtime people predict to actual downtime in cases of outage. Respondents answered that they think they can recover in 2 hours after a disaster, but actual downtime suffered by organization is 5 hours – 150% more than predicted.
In organizations I work with 5 hours of downtime means a lot of money for paid employees sitting there doing nothing, delayed schedules and loss of revenue. No wonder DRP has become a must-have for every organization these days.
However, DRP is just part of the answer. As the acronym indicates, it is intended to take care of disaster situations. But many such “disasters” are foreseeable and preventable.
I think the next step beyond DRP should be preventive maintenance. If you regularly check your systems and fix those small annoying problems, there’s a good chance you won’t need recovery. Since GoMidjets sells a preventive maintenance product – ClearCheck – I see that companies begin to realize that it’s better to prevent than to recover.
I’m not saying you should throw your DRP program out of the window. On the contrary, it’s crucial to think about the worst possible scenario. I’m just saying, having prepared for the worst scenario, think what you can do to avoid getting there.
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