Despite all the (deserved) attention given cyberattacks, 82% of unplanned downtime can be attributed to application failures, hardware failures, or operational errors – at a time when 64% of business data and systems are considered either mission-critical or business-critical . No wonder 80% of organizations now demand a minimum of 99.99% availability – i.e., just 4.33 minutes of monthly unplanned downtime.
It takes just one serious business disruption for your clients to realize they’re not adequately equipped to protect their enterprise’s operations and its assets. Here’s how you can help them better prepare:
1 Show your clients what works
IT professionals confident in their organization’s ability to cope with a business disruption cite two key contributors:
- Clearly defined disaster recovery compliance requirements ; those who have developed compliance requirements tend to have a DR plan in place. They also recover more quickly from a major business disruption.
- Commitment to a multi-site IT resilience strategy ; 68% of those with such a strategy are confident that their applications, networks, and IT services will function as expected in an outage. A multi-site IT resilience strategy can take several forms, including moving IT infrastructure to a managed service provider’s environment and using Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) .
2 Show your clients what to do
Every business needs a business resilience strategy – otherwise known as business continuity. Without a carefully considered business continuity plan based on a business impact analysis (BIA) and a risk assessment , no amount of jiggering your clients’ data-, systems-, and network-oriented recovery stances will prevent more unplanned downtime than they can afford.
With a business continuity plan in hand, your clients need to craft disaster recovery plan specifics detailing how they’ll recover their IT systems and services or (here’s where a multi-site IT resilience strategy comes into play) relocate them to a third-party hot site or other alternate space (cloud, co-lo), thus returning the business to normal operations ASAP.
The goal of your clients’ DR plan is to establish easy-to-use, repeatable processes for responding to business disruptions – processes that must…
- Incorporate compliance requirements, since those who embrace them recover more quickly from major business disruptions.
- Integrate security planning and policy into DR planning.
- Address change management, so your clients have established procedures for making changes to their environment and discovering what changes caused problems.
- Train your clients’ employees.
- Optimize service-level agreements (SLAs) .
- Test your clients’ business resilience planning – the business continuity plan and the disaster recovery plan – at least once a year (continuously is way better).
3 Bring in expert BC/DR help when you need it
A trusted technology partner with deep experience in business and IT resilience can help you ruggedize your clients’ businesses against disruptions.
