More enterprises are putting their data into the cloud. Gartner Inc., which recently predicted that a corporate “no cloud policy” would eventually be as rare as a corporate “no Internet policy” is today, is expecting the global cloud services market to almost double between 2016 and 2020.
Organizations are looking to cloud to help ensure they retain access to their sensitive, and often operations-critical, corporate data. “Downtime” is a particularly ugly word — named perhaps for the staggering costs associated with being down. These costs were highlighted in a recent study by ITIC:
- 98 per cent of companies set the cost of one downtime hour at over 100K
- 81 per cent set the cost at over $300,000
- 33 per cent set the cost at between $1 million and $5 million
IDC, meanwhile, sets the average cost of downtime at about $100,000 per hour, and says the unplanned application downtime costs the Fortune 1000 between $1.25 billion and $2.5 billion a year.
The cost and complexity of disaster recovery (DR) is falling, and more organizations are beginning to see future planning as a present benefit. Companies are coming to properly value their data as one of the make-or-break factors in their present and future viability.
This shift to increased mindfulness — a healthy fear of what could happen — seems to be coming at just the right time. Companies today have a great deal more to contend with than merely natural disasters.
For one thing, the days of the hacking adventurer have passed. Today’s hacker is a machine, both super-persistent and devilishly creative. Now your business can be brought to a halt if someone on your network so much as opens an email.
This makes the question never more important: Does your DR plan make the grade? Is your IT group’s involvement in DR deep or general? And from there, one final but critical question: How long could your enterprise afford to be down?
Pre-cloud era, the bulk of DR scenarios were cost-heavy, which had the effect of dampening organizations’ enthusiasm for DR. After all, who wanted to pay, and keep paying, for something that would likely never occur? Although DR budgets would be submitted every year to management, it was often the first piece to be snipped from overall budgets when push came to shove. Some called it “sticker shock” while for others, cutting DR was simply a matter of absorbing a relatively low risk.
On March 20th, ITWC CIO and Chief Digital Office Jim Love will be joined by special guests Mohamed Jivraj from TeraGo and Dmitri Li from Zerto in a discussion of the cornerstones of creating a DR strategy for 2018 and beyond. Among the topics to be covered in this live, one-hour event:
- How cloud solutions can make DR plans workable
- Cloud, hybrid or on-premise?
- How to make the case for DR spend
- Establishing the cost of downtime
Register today for “How to create and execute a great Disaster Recovery plan in the cloud.”