Progression had invited a few CIOs and IT heads to a discussion on IT Disaster Recovery recently. While there was overwhelming concurrence that companies now need to invest in DR, they cited many problems of having it implemented. One of the key reasons was “Management buy-in”.
To get buy in from the management, we need to bust some disaster recovery myths that are floating around. Let’s tackle them one by one.
“We don’t need DR!”
“We are not a bank, or a stock exchange. If we are down for a few minutes, it’s no big deal,” says someone from the C-suite.
A few minutes downtime is not an issue at all for your business. How about 1 hour? 2 hours? 4? 8? 12 hours? 2 days?
So which is the point when the business starts losing money? Maybe invoices are not being generated, maybe communication about product delivery to the customer is not going through, maybe half your team is sitting around waiting for key real-time information that the application has. Maybe production has to be halted as new purchase orders are not getting processed!
When do you say, enough is enough? That is the starting point for you to consider IT Disaster Recovery.
Most enterprises running business critical applications cannot afford to be down for too long, they need DR. And given the state of affairs today–unrest, natural calamities, terror attacks, and not just IT errors or hardware failure–your usual backup and restore plan, or even an HA setup can only do so much.
“It’s too expensive”
“DR is for the banks, the moneybags! They can’t be offline for even a moment, as they lose crores of business in that moment. They can afford DR!”
How often have you heard that! The statement was true till, maybe a couple of years ago. Not anymore. With Managed Cloud services a reality, DR is now available as a service. Add the cost benefits of cloud to the business benefits of being available as per your business demands. And you have a winner. Welcome to IT Disaster Recovery as a service.
“It never works!”
There are a few horror stories that have happened in recent times, where we have heard of companies having DR as part of their Managed Services deal with leading IS vendors. Only to realize that such a thing didn’t exist, or kick into action as per plan, when IT downtime hit big time. So companies paid for DR as part of a larger deal, but never did get any benefit out of it.
So if your top management says, “It never works,” we blame it on these instances.
DR works, when there is ownership from the service provider as well, when they conduct DR drills regularly so inhouse IT teams are clear about what they need to do, or not do if downtime happens for any reason.
“It’s too intrusive”
“Those DR drills–I know they are meant to train us, but they always get in the way!”
Everyone hates fire drills, building evacuation drills, any drill. Simply because they know it’s not the real thing, and there’s high-priority work to be completed. Drills always stand in the way of something.
But you can’t deny the necessity of having them.
A DR drill is too intrusive if it’s done in the middle of a heavy work day. If it’s planned in such a way that it causes least annoyances, and just keeps the key stakeholders in the drill loop, possibly on a slow day or even a holiday, it is not intrusive. That’s how Progressions runs its DR drills.
“It requires new skillsets”
“We need new skillsets for DR. So we need to hire people who basically don’t do much, until disaster strikes?”
This is old thinking again. You don’t need to hire new people. You just outsource it to experts like Progression’s DRaaS team. They work with your inhouse IT team to ensure drills are done, as un-intrusively as possible. All the capability building is our headache, all the technologies and tools are our problems. All you have to do is question us: “Are you meeting our RTOs and RPOs?”
DR has had a makeover over the last two years. From being a cost and effort intensive exercise, high on capex, it has become a zero capex, low opex service, in which you can hold a service provider like Progression accountable.
Talk to us, or better still come to our data center. Let us show you how.
