Five steps to evaluating business continuity services
In the past, most enterprises defined a disaster as an act of nature--a hurricane,
tornado, flood or fire that wipes out their ability to conduct business as usual.
Today, with worldwide networks, 24/7 customer call centers and Web applications,
a common electrical failure could spell disaster when communication is interrupted
in the supply chain, online transactions are halted or networks are down. Online
resource Dictionary.com
has even added "business failure" to the list of calamitous events
that define a disaster.
With this in mind, companies are stepping up their use of hosted business continuity
(BC) and availability services--not just for those acts of nature, but also
for everyday occurrences that might interfere with stringent uptime requirements.
Business continuity and disaster recovery are intertwined. While disaster recovery
is the set of steps and processes involved in restoring a data center to normal
operation after it has been partially or totally taken offline by some event,
business continuity involves managing emergency coordination, notifying employees
and interacting with emergency officials.
The frequency of common business interruptions has boosted the market for external
disaster recovery services--which include data center services, backup and mobile
recovery services--to US$3 billion to $4 billion a year, according to Gartner.
The market size for capital expenditures on in-house servers, storage and internal
staff used for business continuity and disaster recovery is harder to quantity.
Very often, that server and storage infrastructure can be brought in to support
other applications and initiatives. Although it still needs to be backed up
and may have to be managed, restored and brought back to life, it is not always
counted in the disaster recovery budget.
Here are some points to consider when evaluating business continuity and availability
services and software.
1. Weigh the benefits of specialized business continuity planning software.
Business continuity planning software can help large companies formalize the
BC framework and continually update the plan. "Of companies that actually
have plans, 50 percent use software and 50 percent use informal software"
such as Excel spreadsheets, says Stephanie Balaouras, a senior analyst at Forrester
Research in Cambridge, Mass.
Software providers such as Strohl
Systems Group and SunGard
Data Systems, and emerging players such as eBRP
Solutions and U.K.-based Office-Shadow
offer BC planning solutions. Regulated industries that face audits, such as
life and health insurance companies or financial institutions that require uniformity
in how they build their plans, may benefit from one of these software packages.
Reviews are mixed, however, about how beneficial they are in an actual emergency.
"Business continuity plans that are generated by people within the department
with known [software] like MS
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