With the recent announcement of the abolition of Reed Exhibitions' 2009 Business Continuity Expo, it is clear that service providers expect UK companies to reduce their budgets for disaster recovery and business continuity budgets. It seems that some companies have decided to take risks that are not planned at all, while others are trying to find shortcuts to reduce expenses. So far, for most companies, the most obvious puzzle to delete is the test call.
Test calls are a critical part of any disaster recovery plan, but are usually the most expensive component of a solution. At the beginning of a business continuity plan, test calls are often overlooked because service providers and manufacturers claim ease of recovery. The amount of hidden costs becomes apparent only during the first test. Even simple tape recovery tests can be very time consuming and therefore very expensive [and often exceed the required recovery time objective or RTO]. To make matters worse, if the test fails, more staff time must be spent on surveys and documentation updates. When unemployment is coming and the team is running empty, simply not letting employees complete the project may not be an option.
Due to poor design, some DR processes are more expensive and can only be performed at the expense of uptime. Sometimes you need to move or shut down a physical server to perform all environment or application testing. Some business continuity recommendations are correct and require service providers to bundle ' test calls into service contracts. That's fine, but it usually doesn't take into account hidden costs such as resources, transfers, and document updates.
It believes that reducing or delaying test calls is part of a direct budget cut, but what is the cost? When the time is ripe and the business is booming, cash flow is rarely a problem. As stakeholders recognize the need for business continuity plans and related insurance strategies, IT budgets will increase. In fact, in this case, the organization may be able to recover from the effects of IT downtime for a few days. Of course, some customers will switch to your competitors, some of them will never come back, but your order and cash flow will be strong enough to complete the business. In contrast, during the recession, when the order volume was small and the cash flow was tight, IT downtime during the same period and the resulting business losses were enough to break the camel's return. Here, the economic downturn makes effective business continuity planning even more important.
Some service providers have partnered with their customers to find this dichotomy solution. If the right approach is taken, the intrusion process can be left to the service provider. The service provider provides a detailed document processing flow and provides the equipment and manpower to independently invoke the solution without affecting the IT operations or the teams supporting it. After the solution is fully invoked, the enterprise can perform specific application tests and update the documentation before leaving the service provider to remove the intrusion test again.
This sounds like a shift from outsourcing a disaster recovery solution to a service provider. This sounds expensive, but it is not. The recovery team of the hosting service provider performs test calls every day of the year. Usually, there are very few real-time calls, but test calls happen periodically. Since test calls are a regular operation and are usually highly automated, the cost is kept small and, more importantly, included in the contract. For servers with 60GB of data, and achievable near-zero recovery point objectives [RPOs], the contract on the market is about £50 a week. Why do you do this yourself?
Orignal From: Is disaster recovery testing too expensive?
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