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Top Three Disaster Recovery Planning Tips for Business Continuity

Clement Goh, Managing Director, South Asia (ASEAN & India), and Equinix

Clement Goh, Managing Director, South Asia (ASEAN & India),

Unplanned outages can happen for reasons as routine as hardware failure and extraordinary as floods and fires - did you know that according to a UN study, Asia Pacific (APAC) is the world’s most disaster prone region? It experienced over 1600 natural disasters over the past few years, making up 40 percent of the global total over the past decade. The region also faced economic damage of more than half a trillion dollars during the same period, accounting for 45 percent of the worldwide total.

Despite all of this, the discussion of proper disaster recovery (DR) is nearly as old as the notion of an IT department. Ensuring the continuity of data, applications, and service assets is widely acknowledged by enterprise executives as an important function, but there have been certain challenges that have encumbered the implementation of DR for organizations which are:

Cost: Implementing a DR plan typically required significant expense including additional storage, administration and power
Complexity: The distributed nature of modern IT infrastructure complicates DR practices. Instead of being neatly contained in a single data center on site, today’s information systems are spread across a complex array of services and must also support many mobile devices and applications.
Support: Building and maintaining a DR solution

requires not just technology but expertise, which is rarely something companies have staffed for or can afford to keep on an ongoing basis.

However, these do not have to be the Achilles’ heel of your organization as there are viable options to think about.

Weighing in the Cloud

Businesses are increasingly deciding that their best disaster recovery plans are built in the cloud. This offers many benefits since a cloud-based disaster recovery plan virtually replicates a company's computing infrastructure in the cloud

Some of the benefits include lower costs, less infrastructure to maintain, geographic separation, on demand scalability along with realigning costs and value to reflect the needs of today’s IT- driven business.

The Interconnected Data Center

Another option is to leverage an interconnected data center provider for DR purposes. Apart from offering reliability, redundancy and resiliency to keep your business running, an interconnected data center can also expedite recovery as organizations can rely on various data centers across the globe and countless networks to ensure business continuity.

Additionally, distance makes a difference. Insufficient distance between a company's disaster recovery sites can leave its entire operations vulnerable to a regional storm or outage. If your data center provider is able to deploy geographically distributed computing environments, this can keep your IT infrastructure intact, even when some components fail.

Business Continuity Trading Rooms

The electronic trading industry’s increased reliance on technology, combined with the risks of terror attack and natural disasters have made financial trading firms more vulnerable to significant disruption. If a disaster cuts off access to trading floors or makes it impossible to retrieve data or close market positions, financial firms need a continuity service that enables them to keep trading.

Business continuity trading rooms can help ensure that your mission critical trading operations can continue to operate during a crisis through a financial services ecosystem.

In conclusion, the benefits and importance of a disaster recovery plan are clear to ensure business continuity. Once a thorough plan is implemented, an organization can better mitigate risk, minimize downtime, remain compliant and ensure corporate and even personal data are safe and protected.