Fundamentally, disaster recovery is based on the premise that in the traditional approach, a company cannot afford to treat all its applications equally. In doing so, a company waters down its budget for business continuity with a business application demanding the same level of recoverability as a tertiary application. It’s a flawed philosophy — and for 20 years it’s permeated the business planning industry.
When companies must reduce costs, they cut back somehow, somewhere— and then apply the cutbacks across the board, thereby equally reducing the business continuity plan’s effectiveness.
What is the right decision? It’s to say, “We can no longer afford to recover this particular application for the funds applied across the enterprise.” Even better, “We are making a business decision that this application we will no longer be recovered.”
If a company has a discreet application without which they could not operate, then they must consider how this application must be the prime focus for disaster recovery. A good example is Halloween Express. The company only operates a business five weeks a year. Clearly their application must be drop-dead mission critical and immediately recoverable.
Clear Sailing, business intelligence outsourcing firm, is another interesting example. It receives data every day, number crunch it, and return sophisticated results from the data the next day. If you are Sears or Wal Mart, gleaning knowledge from sales data is very difficult. For a reasonable monthly fee, Clear Sailing provides sales analysis, helping retailers spot important, actionable trends.
If companies like that can’t compile the data nightly, then they cease to exist. That can’t happen.
Business continuity planners almost universally say intelligence or data warehouses aren’t even on the top five list for recovery. But so many make decisions on the data from the warehouse. But if it was lost, what would happen to their business. It would be incredibly detrimental. And when disasters do occur, there is a substantial body of data that describes downward spirals for business. We will deal with this in a subsequent blog.