Q&A
SNIA EUROPE
4
Priority and forethought
A Question and Answer session on disaster recovery, with Chris Sopp, SNIA Europe Board of Directors, HP.
Q How should insurers view the provision of Disaster
Recovery as a way to differentiate their service offering – particularly to the burgeoning SME market?
A Disaster Recovery and at a wider level Data
Protection are a critical business need for all SMEs; dData is the “life blood” of any business these days and in most companies, especially small or medium businesses, it is not easily valued, or its value itself is not understood.
These facts coupled with questions like ‘how old is the data?’ and ‘how quickly is the data needed?’ should all be part of a comprehensive Data Protection and Disaster Recovery plan, which should be visible from the board down in the company.
A Q
Is demand for Disaster Recovery increasing? The demand is increasing greatly. The information
volumes are growing (approx doubling every two years), media and file formats are proliferating, and processing power and complexity of environments are also increasing. Opening out access to systems through email and the Web, plus company representatives demanding access from everywhere, open up the system to malicious attack or general apathy as far as data security is concerned.
All these factors increase the threats to system failure and therefore the need for a coherent recovery plan.
Have the storms and floods of recent years served to raise awareness of Disaster Recovery? Yes, these global events along with earthquakes and
A Q
terrorist threats all contribute to the need for businesses to have an actionable Disaster Recovery plan. However please remember the most prevalent cause of data loss is still human error!
2010 as it relates to disaster recovery? Unusually, the biggest issues for companies that
A Q
have been through a major data loss is not getting the information back, it is reconstituting the environment, the infrastructure. Getting the servers and the actual offices up and running again is a critical factor. At the top end of the scale, take the horrifying news from Haiti - there will be forms of martial law, non-access to certain zones and regions, something that was also seen in New York after 9/11; in some cases access to the building was not allowed for days and weeks.
Away from the ability to enact the plan, the selling process, needs to encompass, sizing, scalability, technology, data structures and file formats. At the end of the day it’s all about guiding the organisation to what its special needs are, qualifying the business needs and coupling those with the budget. Just like quantifying the systems for initial purchase, but looking at it from an insurance point of view, rather than primary use.
Q Is it true that only large companies have disaster
recovery strategies in place. And what are the limitations for small businesses generally – are the costs prohibitive, or is it simply a case of being a low priority on a long list?
A This is an interesting point; as pointed out above,
there should be a Disaster Recovery solution for every eventuality, at pretty much every price point, from a very crude stand alone USB drive for £100 to full-blown multi node clustered systems with failover and mirroring across different continents. So it is down to priority, and forethought. Everyone finds a way to afford it once they have experienced a major loss, if they are still trading!
What are the other major challenges you see for
SUMMER 2010
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
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