FEATURE: BUSINESS CONTINUITY
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When the worst happens
and businesses are
impacted by a system
outage, it’s important to
get back up and running
as quickly as possible.
Intelligent CIO talks to two
industry experts about the
role Business Continuity
can play in restoring
business as normal as
quickly as possible.
B
usinesses depend on IT
to have a plan in place
to maintain operations
when disaster strikes or
outages occur. According
to Gartner, “although
there’s no magic answer on how much
impact downtime will have on your business,
current industry surveys have shown that the
average enterprise estimates an impact of
approximately US$5,600 for every minute
of unplanned downtime in its primary
computing environment.”
This adds up to over US$300,000 per hour.
Unfortunately, for many enterprises, back-up
and recovery contingencies are insufficient.
For one thing, the cost of maintaining and
supporting a remote recovery site for a
mirrored system with duplicate hardware
and software is prohibitive given the high
capital expense. For another thing, back-up
and recovery is extremely labour-intensive
and time-consuming.
Here we ask Rick Vanover, Director of
Strategy for Veeam Software, and Werno
Gevers, cyber resilience expert at Mimecast
MEA, a number of questions about how an
effective Business Continuity solution can
help when the worst happens.
Rick Vanover, Director of
Strategy for Veeam Software
How important is it for
enterprises to ensure they have
an effective Business Continuity
(BC)platform in operation?
A complete and robust BC strategy is more
important than ever today. A number of
reasons emphasise this reality. First of
all, basically all organisations are digitally
transformed to some amount. Which
means, if there is an incident that removes
the technology infrastructure, this removes
the ability for the organisation to function
as designed. This would translate to loss
of revenue, reputation and more if not
adequately prepared.
The second point is that there really are few
excuses today NOT to be fully complete in
BC and associated disaster recovery. The
capabilities on the table are incredible and
whether an organisation has an on-premises
data centre, leverages service providers or
the public cloud; it’s time for proper BC and
Disaster Recovery, and the technologies are
there for it.
How often do BC systems need
to be updated?
Realistically – real=time. This was one of the
underlying principles we undertook at Veeam
when we launched Veeam Availability
Coping with
disaster
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