Recovering the Business - Page 2

By  Lynn Haber | Sep 26, 2001
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When selecting a business recovery partner, Phillips had several key criteria:

  • The scope of services offered to bring up the company's systems without the use of internal staff.
  • A vendor who is constantly looking for improvement in how they deliver services.
  • The vendor should be proactive.
  • Cost is important but Phillips also looked beyond costs to the value-added vendor services.
  • Global capability.

Today, Phillips spends slightly more than one million dollars per year on disaster recovery/business continuity services from IBM. This figure, notes McGraw is less then the company spent five years ago--at least 30% less. He attributes the decrease in spending on disaster recovery to two key factors: The first has to do with cost. While technology has improved the cost of technology has decreased which means Phillips gets more for its money. Secondly, the company also has less people working on disaster recovery/business continuity than it did in the past. Today, only one full-time person is devoted to disaster recovery/business continuity while many people make it a part of their daily jobs. In the past, there was a separate organization, of four or five full-time people, that oversaw disaster recovery/business continuity.

At Phillips, and other organizations, robust recovery plans tend to be driven by senior management. When upper management understands the potential for losses to the business as a result of some disaster, it understands the complexity and integration of IT systems and business processes across the organization.

Organizations have to decide to what level they want to grow their business continuity plans, for example, are they looking for traditional disaster recovery or are they looking for high availability and instant fail over? Once an organization has a business recovery plan in place it must get revisited because the IT infrastructure is always changing as is the business, its needs and requirements.

Lynn Haber writes on business and information technology from Norwell, MA.

lthaber@ix.netcom.com

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