Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Don't Focus on the Wrong Areas When Making Your Plans

Sure, planning for catastrophic failures such as tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes can make your day more interesting. But the fact of the matter is most Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery incidents involve situations far more mundane.

According to Strategic Research Corp., the leading causes of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery incidents are:

o 44% Hardware Failure-Servers, disk drives, switches or other core infrastructure components.

o 32% Human Error-The primary mode of human error is either a mistake in a configuration setting or issuing the wrong command on a production system. Human error happens more frequently after hardware replacements and upgrades.

o 14% Software and Firmware Errors-These failures are often related to operating systems errors, driver incompatibilities, and the introduction of new applications to servers that contend for resources.

o 7% Virus/Security Breach-In today's world malicious attacks do happen. Therefore a solid security plan must be part of any credible BCDR initiative. This type of BCDR incident has been increasing and it is vitally important your BCDR solution be able to provide a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) prior to the time of attack.

o 3% Natural Disaster-Natural disasters are often cited as a leading reason for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning but they represent a relatively small percentage of actual BCDR events.

Perhaps even less exciting is that studies show that planned downtime accounts for 70-90 percent of all system outages!

This suggests that we need to look at the concept of business continuity and disaster recovery from the other end of the telescope, effectively inverting the common view to yield a new set of priorities for "disaster" prevention.

Proposed Emphasis for BCDR Planning:

    70-90% of planning focused on minimizing planned downtime
    7-25% of planning focused on preventing un-planned downtime
    3-5% of planning focused on natural disaster recovery

When viewed in this context and with the overall goal of supporting business process functionality, it becomes clear that we must build the case for business continuity and disaster recovery into the foundation of our infrastructure, not consider it something optional to be looked at separately.