Are You Prepared?

“Organizations that are the most transactional, that measure the amount of data lost in minutes rather than days, are those putting the most money into disaster recovery planning,” says Mark Lawson, a sales engineer with Corporate Technologies, a network-service provider in Plymouth. Such a “transactional” company might conduct a huge number of transactions with customers each hour via the phone or the Internet.

Loss of computer data or communication function can mean considerable loss of business, and can even be a death knell for smaller companies, if the loss is severe enough or can’t be restored quickly. “More and more companies have experienced losses, and those stories tend to get around quickly,” Lawson says, a fact driving up the number of inquires about disaster recovery planning to local technology firms.

Research from ComputerWorld magazine estimates that IT downtime can cost large public companies up to $50,000 per hour. And Gartner reports that companies that are entirely dependent on technology for business—such as e-commerce sites, online brokerages, and trading platforms used to trade bonds—can face downtime costs of $1 million and beyond. That’s why a stock-trading company, for example, won’t hesitate to fund redundant IT systems that can enable it to quickly begin processing trades again should main networks fail.

“That is often the justification for [business continuity disaster recovery] expenditures,” Bult says. “It’s easier to get budgets approved if you can get business-unit manager buy-in based on their understanding of the cost of outage.”

Making a Plan

Disaster recovery and business resumption plans for telecommunications vary by size and type of business, but most have some common elements. Many create redundant, traditional phone connections to back up voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) technologies in the event of power outage, and others use third-party providers to upload and copy client lists, confidential product and service information, and other key data.

New, more cost-efficient technologies have put secure data backup within reach of more organizations, Lawson says. “It used to be if you wanted to back up data, you had to pay someone to store it for you. But more businesses are multi-location, and wide area network technology enables them to do it themselves if needed,” he says.

Steve Hatcher, vice president and general manager of Time Warner Telecom, says more of his company’s customers keep a primary server on site but place backup servers off site at one of Time Warner’s facilities. “If they have a failure on site, all of their data is mirrored in our facility and it runs as a backup,” he says.