The Cost Of Poor Business Continuity Planning

It helps to remind clients that business continuity plans work best when data protection and recovery sit at the core. It’s one thing for a client to scramble to keep in touch with their customers when the grid is down; it’s another when employees can’t access their email, CRM systems or app suites when the power is back on.

  • March 24, 2021 | Author: Todd Hyten
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Did anyone have a deep freeze in Texas causing data center shutdowns in their disaster pool? No? The power outages in early February affected many businesses well beyond Texas. But the unfortunate incident may have a silver lining. 

If you have a client whose business continuity plans may be wanting some attention, incidents like the Texas outages are a good time to remind them of the cost of poor planning.

 

It also helps to remind clients that business continuity plans work best when data protection and recovery sit at the core. It’s one thing for a client to scramble to keep in touch with their customers when the grid is down; it’s another when employees can’t access their email, CRM systems or app suites when the power is back on.

 

Consider just a few of these costs of poor business continuity planning: 

  • Lost productivity:  According to Gartner, the average cost of IT infrastructure downtime can be $5,600 per minute, or more than $300,000 per hour. In reality, many variables will affect the actual cost, but even at 25 percent of that average, it’s a costly proposition.
  • Ransomware costs: No business should pay to get their data unencrypted. It identifies them as a “mark” for other hackers. Recent data from Q4 2020 pegged the average ransomware payment at more than $150,000 and a median of about $50,000. Consider too that ransomware recovery costs alone can be 23-times payment cost.
  • Reputation damage: Not all damage is financial. If your client shuts down for a long time, their reputation suffers. If it’s due to a data breach or ransomware, businesses will worry about how secure their data is with your client. 
  • Regulatory repercussions: Does your client operate in a business with regulatory oversight? Fines may not be the worst of it, consider the extra time and resources that must be shifted to dealing with or appealing regulatory action. 
  • Recovery costs: This may seem to be a part of all of the above, but in some cases where a company has decided to keep much or all of its data in-house, on premises, they will be incurring the full recovery costs. 

But it’s not that hard to get a client’s business continuity plans into the green. All they need to do is pay attention to a few fundamentals of data protection: 

  • Consolidate data: Converging data storage and protection is a good step – it forces the enterprise to account for all its data put it all in the same infrastructure. 
  • Protect edge and unstructured data: Even small and mid-sized businesses will have a distributed data environment thanks to remote, home, and branch offices. That data needs to be protected for fast recovery as much as what’s in your data center.
  • Don’t forget the Cloud: Whether your client have cloud-based apps or not, any data moving through the cloud should be protected. Daily cloud-to-cloud backups ensure all the data stays unaltered and recoverable. 

And finally, testing restore capabilities to ensure they are as fast as possible is always a good practice—especially before the next disaster. 

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