Why Is A Disaster Recovery Strategy So Important Today?

The amount of downtime an organisation can ‘really afford’ is directly related to the financial, legal or public relations impact an application has on the organisation in the event of its unavailability.

During the BIA a pain point is established whereby the impact of the application unavailability significantly spikes. This will provide the time key which identifies the amount of downtime your organisation can afford.

These well known metrics are the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), both of which have a direct impact on the amount of investment it takes to protect the application.

The more aggressive these metrics are, the more expensive the infrastructure required to protect them. Getting this impact versus cost balance right is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations when implementing and maintaining DR capability.

Another challenge for businesses creating a DR strategy is that they have to decipher the tangible and intangible impacting factors and deal with emotive and unrealistic views on the impact of applications.

For example, human nature dictates that ‘my’ application is the most important and so requires the highest level of protection. The consequence of that is huge expenditure required to ensure minimal downtime for applications that do not have the business impact to warrant such investment.