How to partner for disaster recovery - Tape/Disk/Optical Storage

Computer Technology Review, April, 2003 by Jason Buffington

As IT budgets become more constrained, yet the need for disaster recovery solutions continues, systems integrators are finding it harder to. engage in these mission critical projects. In this article, we will look at a few ideas to help in this worthwhile cause.

* First, every project begins and ends with ROL and a sponsor.

* Somewhat related to that, "being a partner" should .be mutual.

* And last, there are alternative technologies that you may be less aware of, but will meet your clients' goals better and more cost effectively than the normal tool set.

As a disclaimer, everybody has his own opinions on these matters--so always test these ideas against your own experience.

Sponsors and ROI

One of the ironies of business continuity projects is the difficulty in properly identifying the executive sponsor and justifying the Return on Investment (ROI) of the project. Disaster preparedness is something that most employees would agree "the company should do." This is analogous to a few people standing around the water cooler and saying, "They should do something about that." The challenge is figuring out who "they" are.

With most IT decisions, one rarely has to reach higher than a technology professional, except for high budget items. In fact, even the disaster recovery of one's IT infrastructure may only have to be approved at this level. But for real business continuity plans, it is as much about process, procedure and people as it is about technology. The result is that senior IT staff recognize that they cannot own the entire scope of the project--and yet no one seems sure who should. Consequently, many business continuity plans die in their infancy from a lack of executive support.

As a suggestion, find the executive who has the highest authority over IT decisions. Then, identify his peers who are responsible for the business units that generate profits. Those individuals are the ones who can most easily visualize a loss of productivity and profitability during any kind of crisis. The other individual to identify is the person responsible for the company's bottom line. Either of these types of individuals is a good choice for your "sponsor," because they understand the implications of an outage.

At this point, you have at least one individual who is concerned or anxious about the possible losses during a crisis. And since data, or technology in general, is a key to preparedness, you've also already identified the IT person who will either be the hero or the scapegoat. One way or the other, you now have a sponsor.

Start With the Business Impact

The other part of the burden is determining the ROI for a business continuity effort. This again comes back to everyone knowing that they need protection, but not understanding how badly or to what extent. ROI is effectively how quickly you can recoup your project costs. To understand that, we must first understand how much the problem costs before we can compare that to a solution cost. There are a few easy metrics to help with this.

For any given server, you need to measure the productivity impact if the server were turned off. If 60 people across one department would be unable to work, then the math is easy. If this were a call center or other type of hourly wage mass workforce, then 60 times the average worker rate is the "downtime per hour." For salaried environments, it may be easier to. ask accounting what the monthly payroll number is for the department and divide that by the number of working hours. For environments that could do other tasks and therefore would be impacted only "X" percent, use that as a multiplier. If none of these figures is available, get the industry standard hourly rate. One recent figure that I use quoted "the average white-collar American costs $36/hour to their company." So now you have a quantifiable business impact for lost productivity.

* If a given server or department is profit generating, then divide the average monthly gross revenue by the number or working hours for the business impact for lost profitability.

* If a given server or department is not profit generating, and they are a support organization, this data cost may be harder to assess. So look at how they support the profit model. As an example, a shipping department does not generate revenue; but if a company cannot ship what it has sold in a timely manner, it will soon stop selling.

With not much effort, it is very easy to quantify the business impact of any outage. Then, looking at the frequency of outages over a given time period will help a company understand its level of risk.

From there, if the company executives can decide on the tolerable levels of impact (e.g., four hours of downtime with less than one hour of lost data), then you have the parameters of what a solution must deliver. Dividing the annual business impact by the projected solution cost will give you the ROI on your proposed solution. As an example, if a company's financiers are focused on each quarter, then any solution with an ROT of up to three months is an easy sell. An ROL of two quarters might be reasonable. And an ROT of three quarters starts looking foreboding--until you remember that these types of solutions typically have a multi-year life. So the solution costs might be recouped over 9 to 12 months, with the guarantee of no impact for the next two years. Now we have a very attractive ROT proposal again.