Most business professionals, including many in IT, interchange and confuse the meanings of business continuity, disaster recovery, and high availability. Each term has a unique meaning, although their individual functions do coexist with each other.
Planning is vital because 43% of companies with a major data loss do not reopen, and 51% close within two years. That means only 6% of companies with a major data loss survive long term! [Source IBM] Planning is everything!
Keep in mind, disasters include more than just natural disasters like hurricanes, flooding, and snow storms. Businesses must also plan for localized disasters to just their building such as a lightning strike, power outage, and water leak, as well as server crashes and cyber-attacks.
Regardless of what you call it, the importance is “if we lost this business location how would we recommence our business?”
Defining the Business Terms
- Business Continuity – The processes and procedures to ensure mission-critical services can operate with as little of a disruption as possible during a disaster. This management plan should include essential business functions including production, customer support, accounting, and sales. Plans must include how the company will re-establish all services to their normal, fully functional level.
- Disaster Recovery – The storage, replication, and recovery of data in the event of a disaster.
- High Availability – The systems or components in place to provide a relative 100% operational uptime.
Dissecting the Differences in Layman’s Terms
Disaster Recovery is a subset of Business Continuity and pertains to IT’s plan for just the data. The Business Continuity plan is the overall strategy that covers the entire company. Think of it like this, Disaster Recovery is data-centric and Business Continuity is business-centric. High Availability requires infrastructure to be in place to ensure minimal interruption, which is also a subset of the Business Continuity plan.
For example, a Business Continuity plan for a hurricane evacuation could be for all employees to report to a satellite office in Baton Rouge, LA with their laptops, and the Disaster Recovery plan states how the employees will then access the data to do their jobs (production, billing, support, sales, etc.) at the temporary location. High Availability is the procedure and components for the data stored on the local server to immediately switch to a back-up facility out of the hurricane’s path.
First and foremost, even with a hurricane bearing down on a company, the company can stay operational with minimal downtime. Secondly, if the hurricane does impact the main office, the Business Continuity plan will address doing work after the disaster. The Disaster Recovery plan will only address how to access the data during the disaster and how to bring it back online afterwards (as well as backing up that data in both locations).
As I mentioned, you can’t just prepare for hurricanes. What does your company do during a 4-hour power outage or if a disgruntled employee steals your server? Yes, these things happen and if you’re not prepared for them, your company will lose more money than if a plan were in place. Even worse, the company may not rebound from a disaster. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) states 40% of businesses do not reopen following a disaster. [Source: FEMA]
Key Metrics to Know
When developing your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans, it is important to understand these key metrics:
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) – The point in time where you can recover your data from.
- For example, if you back up your data nightly, then your recovery point is 2 am last night. If your server crashes at noon, then you lose all the data created from 2 am to the time the data is restored [which is your RTO below].
Larger companies usually have more frequent RPOs such as within two hours, so they do not lose hundreds of hours of manpower from a server crash.
- For example, if you back up your data nightly, then your recovery point is 2 am last night. If your server crashes at noon, then you lose all the data created from 2 am to the time the data is restored [which is your RTO below].
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective) – How long it takes to recover your data including your core application, email, and backups. RTO usually refers to essential data, as some data such as archives may not be accessible immediately.
- For example, your IT support team can get your data restored from the backup within 4 hours following a server crash.
- Availability – The agreed-upon level of uptime for a service or product, known as a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
- For example, a 99.999% uptime (known as five nines) means you accept being down for 25.9 seconds a month.
The number of 9s behind the decimal point truly does matter because 99.0% uptime means 3.65 days of downtime, compared to 99.99999% uptime is just 3.15 seconds a year!
- For example, a 99.999% uptime (known as five nines) means you accept being down for 25.9 seconds a month.
With each of these metrics, the higher the availability, faster RTO, and the more recent RPO, the higher the cost. A good IT firm will help you determine the ROI (Return On Investment) of your Disaster Recovery plan and advise you on your company’s Business Continuity plan. Yes, your IT support team should understand the big picture of your company’s operations during a disaster, and not just focus on the data aspect.
