Data is a bit like beauty – it’s in the eye of the beholder. One person might look at a number one way and another person would see a different implication from the same number. Survey data in particular can be interpreted lots of different ways. And there are always the sceptics who never believe any numbers.
My goal with the project we just completed in the region ‘The Disaster Recovery Survey 2012: Middle East, Turkey and Morocco’ is that you look at the trends that surfaced instead of looking at the absolute numbers. And more importantly, my hope is that this research raises visibility in the region to address backup and disaster recovery planning now.
It’s not just me saying that there is a need for a sense of urgency around this topic. The results speak for themselves. Your peers reported that one of the top 3 commercial impacts to systems down is the loss of customer confidence/loyalty. A majority also said that loss of revenue was another top negative impact from systems downtime. On average, it takes organizations in the region 2 days to restore systems after a major incident.
I know it is often a struggle to quantify the cost of downtime. But I think this survey spells it out for the region. If your systems aren’t available, you run the risk of losing repeat customers, giving your competitors the opportunity to grab potential customers, and you miss revenue opportunities. If it happens once, you can probably survive as an organization. But if you repeatedly have issues, then you are putting your business at risk.
I think the survey also shows that the things we tend to think of as the “disasters” that cause downtime are anomalies – fires, floods, etc. In this region, we don’t tend to have a lot of natural disasters so you might have a sense of security that you don’t have to worry about disaster recovery planning. If anything, this survey shows you are wrong. Your systems downtime is not going to come from the extraordinary but rather ordinary issues: hardware failures, data corruption, loss of power.
So if you are waiting for something really bad and really rare to happen to make you realize that you need to plan for disaster recovery, you are missing the point. It is the routine occurrences that have the potential to do the most damage to your business, your brand… frankly your competitiveness.
What can you do? Take the first step towards backup transformation to ensure that you have the right infrastructure in place to help you with both your operational recovery and more significant disaster recovery. Think of it as insurance to protect you from downtime. And more just as importantly, a next generation backup infrastructure will allow you to test your recovery plan on a regular basis. Don’t leave this one to chance – you want to know you can recover your systems and your data quickly and accurately. Unfortunately, 82% of your peers in the region aren’t very confident they can do this today. So let’s all learn from this.
