Protecting ME's businesses through high availability (page 1 of 2)

The modern business is a global one that doesn't have time to stop. The massive growth of the Internet and the implications of that marketplace are bringing additional pressure to bear. As one time zone sleeps another wakes up and your business is expected to meet the demands of a 24x7xForever economy. If you're unable to compete on these terms then you can find yourself dead in the water.

As more and more demands are put on businesses to keep pace with faster and faster change, those same demands are being put on the systems that run the business.

The fuel that drives any business is information or data and if the systems on which that data resides cease to operate then you experience an interruption to your business. That interruption can have a catastrophic impact.

This creates a quandary. How do you deploy systems that give you the scalability to deal with the enormous growth in data, at the same time as avoiding downtime and its impact on your business? And, more importantly, how do you maintain Data Availability and avoid the consequences of not doing so?

How can companies in the Middle East know that their businesses are at risk, and what are the effects of data loss on businesses in the ME?

In order to recognise the criticality of Data Availability it is important to understand the risks to your business of failing to adequately protect against unavailability. This is very much dictated by the nature of your business. For example, if a national chain of video shops had a failure that meant they couldn't access their data it would have an impact, but not of the same magnitude as if a trading room in the city or a dot.com had an outage, where the financial impact could run into hundreds of millions of pounds or worse.

Areas of risk:
Lost revenue - for example if you are an airline and your reservation system is down then a potential customer could very easily choose to go to an alternative airline. This would immediately have an impact on revenue through the lost ticket sales occurring during the outage.

Customer satisfaction and retention - the customer may choose to go to the alternative airline next time they need a ticket, resulting in a further impact on long term revenue. In addition to this is the increased cost of winning a new customer rather than retaining an existing one.

Competitiveness - this can be affected in a number of ways. If your systems are down and you are unable to conduct immediate business you are not in a position to compete on any level. If your systems are unavailable and your people are unable to work you are paying them to do nothing. Once back on line you will have to pay them again to do the same work they were previously unable to complete. This has the net result of pushing up costs and reducing competitiveness. Again, any interruption in your business through systems downtime would have an affect on your ability to compete in terms of time to market.

Operational viability - a major site outage can have disastrous consequences. There have been some recent studies in the US that have shown that as many as 43% of companies who have suffered a catastrophic data loss can go out of business permanently.

Corporate reputation - building corporate reputation is a long and costly process. Companies spend millions building their brand and can live and die by the brand and the reputation that goes with it. It is all too easy to damage that reputation.