I want to briefly go through 4 questions to ask when determining whether you need an outsourced IT recovery solution. If you answer any of the following questions with a ‘NO’, you should seriously consider an outsourced solution.
Do you understand the business impact of downtime of your applications?
To sufficiently confirm that you understand consequences of application downtime, you need to have performed a business impact analysis (BIA). A BIA allows you to understand the relative importance of each business application to your business operations. In particular, how application failure can affect different roles in your organization.
You also need to have mapped application inter-dependencies. In many situations, processes may require more than one application for successful completion. Understanding how different applications are linked to each other across your operational process network will paint you a clear picture of how important it is to your business. You need to understand how long your business can run without specific applications.
Can you afford to do IT disaster recovery in-house?
To completely run an in-house disaster recovery, you need to have sufficient budget to implement a disaster recovery program. This entails funding disaster recovery equipment and software, recovery site operations, staff time to develop the recovery procedures and annual disaster recovery testing.
Do you have in-house expertise for disaster recovery?
Keeping your systems maintained and current is an entirely different skill set than recovering and restoring systems after a disruption. A big concern you should have before delegating recovery tasks to an internal person is identifying whether your organization has the human resources sufficient to answer the following questions:
- Does your staff have the skill set to develop a recovery process and detailed procedures?
- Can your staff perform rigorous testing and change control?
- Does your organization actively follow disaster recovery best practices and integrate them into your IT?
- Can your organization perform robust disaster recovery planning and manage a fail-proof disaster recovery program?
Is your business recoverable right now?
What I want to know here is would you be comfortable affirming the following:
- You actively test and validate your disaster recovery plan?
- You handle change management regularly?
- You can prove your business is recoverable through regular audits?
If any of these points hit home, don’t worry! I’ve got the answers and info to help you come up with a game plan.
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