Downtime costs are not something you can calculate exactly. However, along the lines of “what gets measured, gets managed”, it’s useful to have some idea of where you’re headed even if it’s just an approximation. What’s often missing in any formula for this are either one-off charges that you didn’t think of at the time…
As the saying goes, half a loaf is better than no bread, and the same could be said of business continuity. Although you’d like to have an organisation that can weather any storm and survive any setback, if it’s a choice between sub-optimal performance or catastrophic failure, then naturally the first one wins. However, catastrophic…
Tape storage of information sometimes has an image of being out-dated, outmoded and out-performed by disk storage. That’s true enough – in the living room of your home, where audio cassettes and the VHS system for video cassettes are now antiques compared to CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray media. However, a living room is not a…
When you think of business continuity, you might think of manufacturing, financial services, public utilities and emergency services – but would you think of football clubs? Somehow the images of soccer players on a pitch and the “stop and go” of a match with goals scored, free kicks, penalties and half-time don’t immediately bring to…
What does “disaster” mean to you, in the context of a disaster recovery template? Explosion, storm, power outage? The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has an interesting take on this in its “Emergency Management Guide for Business & Industry”. Not only does it also list “loss of key supplier or customer” in its sample list…
MTO and RTO are integral parts of disaster recovery planning, but they can also be used outside of that context. To recap on their definitions, MTO (Maximum Tolerable Outage) is the maximum amount of time that a process or facility can be unavailable before significant disruption and/or financial loss occurs to an organisation. RTO (Recovery…