October 16, 2002—Market research specialist Gartner claims that less than 25% of the Global 2000 companies have invested in comprehensive business continuity planning—and only half have fully tested disaster recovery plans in place.
Gartner argues that the race to grow into real time operators, conducting business across borders and time zones, has led many companies to ignore business continuity principles— despite the fact that they are exposed to unique risks. “For many real-time enterprises, a four-to 24-hour site outage would cause irreparable damage,” said Donna Scott, vice-president and research director at Gartner. “Because the risks are greater with real-time enterprises, the business continuity plan must address new scenarios, and BC processes must integrate with a greater number of enterprise processes.”
The foundations of business continuity planning success are senior management sponsorship and participation, and building business continuity into enterprise culture by weaving the processes into the life cycle of every project, says Gartner. However, their research shows that relatively few large companies are putting these principles into practice.
“It is critical that business continuity be built into the life cycle for new applications and business process enhancement projects so that availability and recovery requirements are built into the design,” said Scott. To determine appropriate availability investments, she added, companies need to understand the consequences of downtime, which will aid in justifying investments for operational availability and business continuity. A first step in developing a business continuity plan is performing a business impact analysis, where critical business processes are identified and prioritized, and costs of downtime are evaluated over time.
Traditional business continuity plans provide 24 to 72-hour application or business process recoverability. With technology more intrinsic and outage costs escalating, Garter points out, many enterprises need shorter recovery times for critical applications. Although rapid real-time enterprise recovery is expensive, the alternative could jeopardize survival.
“The most important activity on which an enterprise should embark is ensuring that, regardless of what their spending is, it is spent in the right place—to protect the most-critical business processes. Real-time enterprises cannot afford to accept risks associated with business continuity vulnerabilities—the consequences could be fatal,” Scott concluded.
—Elliott Chase
Reprinted with permission; copyright 2002 i-FM
