How Much Should You Invest In Disaster Recovery Planning?

investing in DR

Fire. Flood. Power Outage. Terrorist Attack. Street Protests. Issues like these lead to two things for your business: downtime and lost revenue. Neither is good for the bottom line, but with a solid disaster recovery plan in place, your company can limit the fallout.

But how much is that going to cost?

Investing in DR is like paying any other insurance premium.  What is an affordable amount of insurance that gives my company the right reduction of exposure? Determining “the right” investment amount can be tricky because it depends on the type of business you’re running, the specific risks involved and plain old “gut feel”.

However, there are two key areas that all businesses should consider when budgeting for DR.

How Quickly You Need to Be Back in Business 

When that unexpected tragedy hits, how fast do you want to recover? Is it in seconds, minutes, hours, days or weeks?  Or do you not really care, and up and running again within the next month is OK? Recovery services and technologies are available now, that give you the option to choose between next week, or next hour, and everything in-between! Your investment in disaster recovery planning depends on the speed you want to recover. The faster you need access to your company’s files, email systems, billing systems, and telephones, the more money you need to invest in disaster recovery.

The Most Critical Systems to Your Business

In order to decide what kind of timing needs to happen to keep your business afloat, you may want to take a closer look at your most important systems. While you can certainly plan a backup for every single system you have in place that may not be a necessary or affordable cost. Instead, identify four or five critical tiers of the business and focus on the first two. Perhaps it’s email because that’s where your billable revenue comes through. Perhaps it’s your website where people are booking your services each day. Perhaps it’s your network monitoring system so you can tell whether important transmissions are getting through. Once you identify what’s important to you, begin investing in protecting that above all else.

As you consider the appropriate size of your investment in disaster recovery, you may see justification in “hardening” or making improvements for the top tiers, by:

  • Increasing IT service levels;
  • Removing single-points-of-failure (SPOFs) and added redundant pieces;
  • Adding extra capacity;
  • Improving system monitoring and early warning detection of problems;
  • Storing common spare parts nearby;
  • Contracting for supplemental or “just-in-case” services;
  • Tightening-up back-up systems.

DR planning depends very much on what you want to protect and how quickly you need access to it in the event of a disaster. Carefully evaluating what makes your business tick, during the planning stages, will prepare you and focus you for a quick recovery should the unthinkable happen.

Steve Tower

With many years of professional IT experience, and training as a Certified Management Consultant, a Project Management Professional, a Professional Engineer and a Member, Business Continuity Institute, Steve Tower has the skills and abilities required to assist with even the most complex disaster recovery planning initiatives. Below, Steve discusses the necessary tools involved in setting up a disaster recovery plan and program.