Few businesses would deny the importance of having a decent disaster recovery system in place, but creating a complete replica of your IT infrastructure can be an expensive business even before you take into account the intensive planning that's required. Is it possible to actually get a return on your investment in disaster recovery, or will it never be anything more than an insurance policy?
Finance managers--they're horrible, aren't they? Finance types are genetically programmed to demand cost justifications for every single item of technology expenditure you might be planning. IT directors have become very familiar with this scenario in recent years, and it was undoubtedly necessary in the face of excessive expenditures on CRM systems that only annoyed customers and online commerce systems that never actually got online (to pick two random examples).
However, it's a tougher call when you're asked to justify expenditure on disaster recovery systems. If nothing ever goes wrong, then whatever you've invested in them will effectively go down the drain.
Does that mean they're not justified? Of course not. Let's face it, the same finance executives will be the first to complain when they can't access their data if a disaster does occur and there hasn't been adequate provisioning. No wonder a survey by UK security provider Defcom found that nine out of 10 IT security managers would rather report to a chief risk officer than to the finance department.
Nonetheless, in this ongoing era of wafer-thin IT budgets, the questions will inevitably be asked: why are we spending so much on disaster recovery? Is there any way we can actually get some return on all this investment?
No one pretends this is going to be easy. "Disaster recovery is a tough area to address, particularly if you are trying to leverage it to improve performance or get a positive ROI," says Graham Penn, Asia-Pacific director for storage research at IDC.
Inevitably, opinions differ. Despite the higher profile of disaster recovery in recent years (see The S11 factor for more on this), there's an increased awareness of how much it costs.
"There's a movement towards really understanding the cost of disaster recovery," says Phil Morrisey, general manager of the services division at XSI Data Solutions. "People won't just replicate million-dollar equipment."
"There's a big awareness amongst businesses that disaster recovery is something they need to have, but they're struggling with the investment issues," says Simon Penny, storage marketing director for Dell. "These things always go through a business justification cycle."
The next logical step is to actually assess the costs of data not being available. "It's about working out a true assessment of the costs of downtime and what are the risk implications of a system being down," says Terry Carter, marketing manager for Fujitsu. "The value of information is starting to be more visible to companies."
The result of such assessments, many observers argue, can demonstrate the true value of disaster recovery. "It is possible for the investment in disaster recovery to provide the insurance against a disaster, and also provide opportunities to defer hardware cap-ex purchases and have higher availability of business critical applications and systems," says Sal Fernando, chief technical architect at Veritas.
"Business continuity and disaster recovery services are not just an insurance policy but form a major part of the customers' data availability in times of normal operation as well," says Tim Smith, national business continuity manager for Alphawest.
Naturally, data availability doesn't come for nothing. "High availability is extremely high cost, but if you ask people what they want, they always specify the highest availability," says Joan Tunstall, marketing manager for StorageTek. "Then they turn around and say ‘But I want it at the lowest cost'."
Others maintain that disaster recovery is a core requirement, whatever the price tag. "Surprisingly, some enterprises and their CIOs still do not rate the building of a resilient infrastructure as one of their highest priorities," Gartner analyst David Neil remarked archly in a recent commentary.
"Disaster recovery describes itself exactly," says David Yuile, CEO of managed security provider 90East. "It only is of benefit in a disaster. Sharing across multiple sites doesn't make sense unless you're trying to mitigate risk. A lot of people talk about it, but very few take it up."
"Disaster recovery needs to be considered as a central part of any company's IT policy," agrees Scott Dillon, senior manager for Iomega ANZ. "You need to ensure business continuity. You have these things in place to ensure that business operations aren't disrupted."
"It's no longer ‘What's the cost of doing it?'; rather, it's ‘What's the cost of not doing it?'" says Sean Sullivan, business unit executive managed services, IBM Global Services ANZ. But if that cost can't be avoided, there are ways of minimising it and turning it to more general business advantage.
"Implementation and maintenance of disaster recovery and business continuity forces business to critically assess their existing processes, business functions, and procedures and the extent to which they rely on them and how critical they are to their overall operations," says Peter Voysey, consulting services manager for KAZ Technology Services. "This can assist management to determine the worth of certain functions or processes that may have become obsolete or redundant or no longer cost effective."
One non-technology benefit of a good disaster recovery plan is the ability to promote your company's increased stability. "There is a tremendous amount of good PR that can be generated by demonstrating to clients and suppliers that their business is very important to your organisation," says Alphawest's Smith.
"A well-tested business continuity plan is and should be treated as an investment because it improves an organisation's competitive advantage," says Steve Cartland, manager for business continuity and recovery services at HP South Pacific. "Customers want to ensure that the goods or services they purchase from a supplier will be available as they need them."
The alternative can be fairly ugly. "In the networked economy where we have such a heavy reliance on technology, any period of downtime can prove financially damaging as well as detrimental to an organisation's reputation," says Pathy Pathmanaban, vice president of HP Services South Pacific
Factoring this into your budget is more of a problem. "It will always be difficult to calculate returns on intangibles such as greater customer and staff confidence, trust, and regard," says KAZ's Voysey.
Another possible cost saving may be in the area of insurance. "In terms of pure dollars and cents, an effective disaster recovery plan may enable the business to reduce or eliminate certain insurance overheads," says Voysey.
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