The aftermath of disasters are always full of glitches when it comes to recovery, but a solid recovery plan can often help prevent costly errors. As you begin to plan for an outage or a more serious disaster, though, there’s one essential mistake you may want to avoid: underestimating the importance of any given system in your business. It’s the cost of denial of service, and it could mean the difference between a complete recovery in a matter of minutes or hours and the kind of loss that could damage your company.
The Hypothetical
Imagine for a moment that your company could no longer receive email traffic from clients. Take a moment to think what it might be like if you couldn’t process or ship your orders. What if you couldn’t access your customer service records? It is hypothetical situations like these where good disaster recovery planning flourishes.
Understanding the impact of system availability helps you determine exactly how much you want to invest in your contingency plans. Sure, you may have the “if-it-ever-gets-really-bad” plan in the back of your mind, but how long could that manual workaround sustain you? It’s that stop-gap that may save you minutes or hours. While it may help to cushion your organization and help you survive initially, if you take the time to further explore what might happen in that dire situation, you may quickly find your stop-gap to be completely inadequate.
Learning more about where the impact truly is in the business process can often help you qualify and quantify the specific damages, costs, and problems you might encounter so you can judge whether the time and money you’re pouring into disaster recovery planning offsets the expected loss in the situation.
