DR / BCP – A practical Approach

In a recent call, I was asked about DR/BCP. When I probed a little to find out his priorities, I received a sheepish admission that he did not know what it even stood for. As Information Technology is the ultimate creator of acronyms, I am not surprised.

Let’s start with what it means to me. DR is Disaster Recovery and BCP is Business Continuity Planning. My favorite analogy is that DR is how fast you get back up whereas BCP is how hard you try to stay on your feet. The T-1000 from Terminator would get back up no matter what you did to it, making it the ultimate example of Disaster Recovery. Alternatively, Weebles were a classic toy of the 1970s that would always stay standing no matter what you did. They were great at staying up but were not very functional otherwise.

Whatever path you take (either one or both) depends entirely on your business objectives. You can achieve 100% resiliency, but the cost could be prohibitive. You could also have a singular solution, saving the cost but be assured of some amount of downtime. As with everything in the Universe, you must find your balance. When the cost of resiliency meets or exceed the benefits, you have found balance.

So how do you find the cost of downtime? I always recommend thinking back to the last outage you had and list out the most impactful problems that occurred. For my example, I will use an incident related to me. Some details have been changed to protect everybody.

In late 2021, a leading cloud provider had a major outage of 12+ hours. It made global news and impacted many businesses that people did not even realise were cloud based. In this example, a friend of mine was on a flight preparing to depart from a Texas airport. The weight balancing system for the plane utilised this cloud for the calculations, which meant the plane could not be certified and pull away from the gate. The ground crew was frantically running wheel to wheel with a pad of paper and a calculator to manually calculate the balance. During this delay, my friend decided to call the airline to express his frustration at the delay and arrange another flight. Little did he know that the contact center for the airline also ran on this cloud, so he could not reach anyone. Fortunately for the airline, his anger-fueled threats to never fly them again were short lived.

By comparison, another company had strict corporate policies that mandated resiliency across cloud providers or regions, allowing them to be down for 15 minutes versus 12+ hours for others. Their investment in redundant systems and outage detection allowed them to evaluate the situation and execute their backup solutions to mitigate the outage. They could have been even more proactive and had a setup where there was no outage at all, much like what is used for emergency services contact centers (like 911 / 999 / 000 etc.), but they decided to balance of 15 minutes against the additional cost.

The impacts of this are many, including costs of delayed flights, lost revenue for future flights, costs of customer trust when could not be reached, and loss of trust internally for the IT and communications owners. Some of these can be measured exactly, but others are intangible and must be estimated.

Now that we know how much downtime costs us, we can determine what we will do to avoid it. The most common solution is to have a backup system that can quickly take the load when needed. It can be an automatic switch based upon defined criteria, or it can be a manual transition based upon operational control. Another key factor in the cost of the backup system is its complexity. Do you need an exact copy of normal production, including all innovation and adaptation, or is a simplified version sufficient to help customers and maintain trust? How much notification of outage do you need? How much data collection and reporting is required to measure performance and return on investment? All of this factors into the balance and the determination of what makes sense for a business.

The next big challenge is taking this knowledge and mapping the best course of action. As this requires deep and wide expertise in both the operations of business and the capabilities of technology, many companies lack the expertise and available resources internally to properly focus on the issue at hand. Fortunately, there are companies (like CloudWave) that can assist with this critical endeavor as part of larger engagements. By having the requisite expertise in operational capabilities and technology combined with vertical-centric industry experience, our customers can communicate their priorities and allow us to present options and costs for different levels of resiliency.

In closing, let me ‘make you an offer you cannot refuse”. If you will invest one hour with us, sharing your operational and contact center details, we will prepare and present resiliency options for your business. If you already have DR/BCP plan in place, we will evaluate and give objective feedback on it. We will do all of this at no cost to you; all you have to do is listen to my pitch on how we can help, interested? Get in touch

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