Why The Odds Are Against You In Disaster Recovery

Let’s walk down a neighborhood, but it’s not your typical neighborhood. Instead of houses, it’s lined with businesses much like your own. Let’s put yours in the middle, and you have businesses down either side of you, ten total.

One bright morning, you wake up, throw on a robe, and step outside to drink coffee on your front porch. You can know that on any morning:

• 4 of the 10 small businesses on your street will have suffered a cyber attack.
• 6 of the 10 businesses that suffer a cyber attack will be out of business within six months. Your street will have six empty lots where once there was a structure (like a bomb went off or a tornado swept through).
• 9 of the 10 employ different backup and recovery tools. 7 of those 9 will have overlapping capabilities, and of those 7, 6 will experience problems because they use a variety of tools requiring different learning systems and added costs.
• The 5 businesses to your right and the 4 to your left experienced a major outage in the last 24 months (do you feel the walls closing in).
• Your neighbor to the right is the only one who said they could respond and recover from a similar disaster within two hours.

3 of your neighbors have no Disaster Recovery plan in place. If it was a house, it would be uninsured.

Welcome to the neighborhood of Disaster Recovery (DR).

Disaster Recovery is about the information or technology systems that support business functions. It is a component of Business Continuity (BC), which plans to keep all aspects of business functioning during disruptive events.

7 of your neighbors experienced downtime due to human error or hardware failure or power outage. It took them between one to nine hours to recover, at costs ranging up to $700,000.00 per hour. Most of your neighbors, say the four on your right and the three on your left, spent one million dollars each to restore their business to normal.

It’s only a matter of time before one of your neighbors steps out for her morning coffee, and you are the statistic.

As a matter of fact, 7 of your 10 C-Suite Executive neighbors said they are very prepared for Disaster Recovery. But not even 5 of their IT leads agree. You have some domestic disputes in your neighborhood.

Your neighbor to the right is the only one who said they could respond and recover from a disaster within two hours.

Plus, some of your neighbors are being stingy: Not even 5 of them allocate budget for risk-mitigation.

What’s happening in your neighborhood? Fear is rampant. Your neighbors distrust new technology. Ignorance browns the yards; the guys next door lack the expertise to build and test a plan. Money fell from the trees and has been raked away into other expenditures, leaving little behind for essential protection.

3 of your neighbors have no Disaster Recovery plan in place. If it was a house, it would be uninsured. All three of those neighbors will fail if their business is seriously disrupted.

If you called a meeting of your neighbors, you would discover that if they have a plan, it is likely incorrect. If their plan was a garage, and you opened the door, you would find unnecessary technology overwhelming the space. Only one of the business on the block tests their plan monthly (that would be you, right?) Three of your neighbors will make the effort to test it two or three times a year. The guy right next door: He never tests his plan.

Your neighborhood needs a better watch program. Not only are you vulnerable to intruders, regulators will be up in arms over the insufficient information management they will find.

Some of your neighbors have listened. Over two of you use the cloud as a DR strategy, which is an increase of 10% in the last four years. One of you is using Disaster Recovery as a Service.

What should you do?

I will address more of these issues in upcoming articles, but no matter how much you read, you need outside eyes to ensure your maximum protection. It is my pleasure to help so that you feel safe at home.

3 of your neighbors have no Disaster Recovery plan in place. If it was a house, it would be uninsured. Are you your neighbor? Do you know or not know?

How comfortable are you with your odds? Take the C-Level IT Quiz