Analyse business impact: the need for Integrated Data Protection Solutions

The true effect to a business should be measured in terms of operations, financials, regulatory and legal implications. If a business is forced to operate without its systems for a significant period of time the day-to-day information we are used to extracting at the touch of a button will require tedious research and manual labour.

Transactions that would normally take place automatically will cease, staff will be unemployed without these systems, personnel and operating regulations will be more difficult to adhere to and subsequently the efficiency of a business will suffer and management will be faced with making vital decisions to carry the operation through the crisis.

The Interruption of Business Systems
If a business' systems are interrupted it will experience some serious financial losses, in many cases these can be fatal, these losses are no longer covered by insurance. Should any of the fundamental functions within a business be disrupted then inevitably the lack of cash flow will prevent the company from deploying capital to keep the business running. The ultimate risk is that credit ratings suffer, shares go down, the business is unable to fulfil the legal requirements of suppliers', contracts, customers lose faith and may never return, and significant costs can be associated with restoring servers and systems.

Identifying Critical Functions
So when looking at the most appropriate data protection solution for your business the business contingency planner will need to identify the critical functions within the business and estimate the business loss for an outage and the effect time has on the impact. Once you have determined the impact of an incident on a business function, you can determine the recommended recovery timeframe for the function.

The main areas of assessment should be:

· The review of business expectations and service levels

· The review of existing business continuity measures

· Conducting a vulnerability study of existing infrastructure

· Reviewing operational policies and procedures

· Assessing recovery capabilities

· Examining options for reducing risk exposure

Critical applications can be identified in a number of ways:

· List all functions performed

· Interview business functional managers

· Conduct surveys with employees

· Use a questionnaire with the functional managers

Once the critical and necessary business functions have been identified, the next step is to establish the resources that are required to continue to perform those functions. Ensuring that you have the correct level of support for these technologies is imperative as well as ensuring that the solution you deploy is implemented and managed effectively.

The Cost of Continuing Professional IT Education
Training your staff has never been more important. What is the cost of downtime against the cost of continuing Professional Education? When spending a good deal of time and effort in implementing a data storage strategy why jeopardise that investment by not ensuring its on-going management and strength? The cost of downtime in the economy, in which we now live, means that any system outage can have disastrous effects on businesses where the cost of downtime accelerates as the outage increases in duration.

Giving your IT staff the skills necessary to ensure your data storage strategy is fully effective and protecting your business helps you achieve maximum return on investment, helps reduce capital and expenditure by decreasing operating costs and increasing productivity, reduces technical infrastructure costs, increases the effectiveness and retention of IT staff and increases technological competitiveness by improving effective access to business critical information.

In the longer term, the business will need to be restored to its original performance. Identification of all resources required to support the function is required to facilitate the longer-term recovery.

To be entirely effective fly-to-site support engineers and consultant costs should be built into the plan.