Top 5 Considerations to Ensure Recovery
…of Mission Critical Applications in Seconds
Most would agree that backups are a fundamental method of protecting applications in order to ensure organizations can recover data. However, a backup isn’t the end-all solution for business continuity and it doesn’t provide the highest level of protection for mission critical applications. It simply allows organizations to protect their data. Every organization has to make informed decisions based on a number of key application considerations in order to arrive at a recovery technology determination best suited for their business. Although there are many aspects to consider, these are Neverfail‘s Top 5 recommended considerations to help determine criticality.
#1 Time
Mission critical applications are essential to the operation of the business, while also having an imperative impact on revenue. Today’s applications are extremely complex and require specific administrator skills and expertise to get them back and operational as a direct result of a failure. This can take hours and in rare cases, days to recover. This of course is not optimal (nor acceptable) for high value applications.
“$260,000Average cost of an hour-long data center outage” – Neverfail
#2 Finacial Impact
As mentioned, organizations can be crippled by the financial implications of impacted applications. These applications could be processing critical data for:
- Billing
- Payment systems
- B2B supply chain management
- Donations for NGOs
The failure of a mission critical system can cost an organization tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
“$82,000 to $256,000Per-event cost of downtime for small businesses” – Neverfail
#3 Brand and Reputation Impact
Potentially the worst outcome resulting from a critical system failure is the impact on brand reputation. Any downtime can impact partners and customers who EXPECT your critical systems to always be available. The costs of a critical data loss and long recovery times are incurred in many ways, including:
- Revenue losses
- Customer defection
- Regulatory penalties
- Legal fees
- Cyber extortion
- Outside consultancy for remediation
#4 Cyber Security Compliance
Many Cybersecurity frameworks like NIST, ISO, CMMC, SOC require disaster recovery plans and specific controls to ensure critical systems can be recovered. Most include security control requirements to prove who has access to all aspects of the recovery process. Without automation, cyber-security compliance can be an exhaustive unending challenge.
#5 Pandemics
We always focus on the obvious natural disasters like wind, fire, water, and earthquakes. Today, Covid-19 has organizations contending with an added global pandemic that is literally taking out I.T. teams and rending themselves severely at risk for the inability to recover from natural disaster system failures. Now, we have come to terms with the fact that natural disasters and pandemics can occur simultaneously. Losing staff to sickness was once a rarely considered factor, that is now a front and center risk component.
