WHY YOU NEED UNITRENDS
Information technology risk has become one of the most significant corporate threats according to a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The survey, which captures the views of CEOs, CFOs, chief risk officers and other executives responsible for managing risk, indicates that almost sixty percent of companies incurred significant financial damage as a result of a computer systems failure in the past twelve months, while one-third suffered financial damage as a result of cyber-crime such as hacking over the same period. Just under half of executives surveyed now see IT risk as a high or very high risk to their business. (Source:Continuity Central)
At a minimum, IT systems outages can cost thousands of dollars in lost revenue, lost productivity, and legal issues. At the extreme, a sustained outage can threaten the viability and reputation of an organization.
According to the Wall Street Journal, over 40% of enterprises that sustain a major disaster never re-open (see Figure 1 below). A 2003 study from Pepperdine University estimates the total cost of lost data in the United States at $18.2 billion annually, and calls that estimate "conservative."
Other key points:
- A recent International Data Corporation (August 2005) study found that fewer than half of all mid-sized organizations in North America have a business continuity plan in place.
- Another study revealed that 58% of all respondents ranked the potential of data center hardware or software failure as an "extreme" threat to their firms.
- Disaster Recovery Journal pegs the cost of average hourly revenue lost from downtime at $78,000, with an average of 355 worker hours lost for each hour of unscheduled downtime.
- 45% of data is never backed up and less than 27% is backed up (a minimum of) once a week.
- Of the companies that do backup, 25% have experienced an error during restore.
- The average failure rate of tape drives is 100%. In other words, all drives eventually fail.
Business Systems Continuity incorporates a myriad of solutions, including hot standby data centers, data backup and protection software, continuous data protection schemes and technologies, Bare Metal recovery schemes, and manual system re-installations as well as duplicate or hot standby datacenters.
Until now, traditional solutions either duplicated a data center -- roughly doubling an organization's data center costs and complexity -- or relied upon tape and/or disk-to-disk backup schemes. For SMEs, neither of these options is desirable.
Duplicating a data center requires expensive failover systems, continuous monitoring, costly testing and maintenance. The alternative is largely a manual process (see Figure 2 below), starting with operating system installation followed by reinstallation of software applications, patches and updates, and system settings and passwords before data can be reloaded from tape or disk.
Further, when a datacenter consists of multiple operating systems (e.g., Windows Server 2003 running alongside Red Hat Linux) or off-site electronic data storage (i.e., electronic vaulting) is utilized, multiple data protection systems and software are required, causing additional complexity. These options seldom, if ever, allow a business to get "back to business" in a predictable or acceptable time frame.
What's needed today is an all-in-one approach integrating data protection, system recovery, and application recovery along with a singular user interface spanning multiple operating systems and backup locations (local and vaulted storage). Systems requirements also include point-in-time file, system and application recovery while working within the realities of a firm's short backup window.
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For further information on how CPS Technology Solutions can assist with your technology integration needs call us at 1-800-438-4202 or Email.
