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Win Management Support for Disaster Recovery

July 12, 2018
Disaster Recovery

Equipment and software upgrades. New technology purchases. Day-to-day maintenance. Personnel. Training. Compliance requirements. With all the items eating up the IT budget, it’s hard for disaster recovery (DR) planning to compete. You know a DR plan is essential, but getting the support from your organization’s executives for yet another IT expenditure won’t be easy.

There’s no single strategy for gaining management support for DR that will fit every organization. A good place to start, however, is making a business case for DR in terms that upper management can understand.

The Risk of Disaster

Unless they are reading the headlines about the latest natural disasters or data breaches, senior executives typically don’t spend much time thinking about disasters. They do, however, think about risk.

The C-suite sets strategic goals for the organization. They know there are risks associated with achieving them and a need for mitigation strategies to handle the risks. Before requesting DR plan support, conduct a business impact analysis (BIA) to create a risk profile for your company that you can use to support your case for a DR plan.

• Determine potential scenarios that could cause downtime for your organization and the likelihood of them happening. Look beyond headline-grabbing natural disasters like tornadoes and floods. Consider things like cyberattacks and employee negligence as well.
• Identify various risks to your organization if a disaster — natural or manmade — should occur. How would it affect day-to-day operations? Could certain kinds of disasters prevent employees from getting to work? How would your company’s reputation fare if your organization couldn’t function for an hour or a day or a week? Gather case studies of other companies that have endured and/or gone under due to various types of disasters.
• Determine the applications and data required for keeping your business operational. How much downtime, if any, could your organization tolerate if these applications and data were not available?
• Estimate the cost of downtime. You’ll find a variety of free online tools to help provide a general cost range. Keep in mind costs aren’t limited to lost revenue. Things such as a company’s reputation can be severely damaged by excessive downtime.
• Factor in regulatory compliance issues. A business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan may be a legal requirement. Failure to have one in place can result in penalties and fines. If a data breach or other disaster happens that results in the loss of customers’ personal information, there could also be costs associated with notifying those customers and providing them with personal identify protection.

The Bottom Line Benefits of DRaaS

It’s not enough to sell DR based on risk. Many executives fear that DR will be a huge expense and are reluctant to devote resources to something that offers little return. However, there are many DR options that do offer measurable benefits. Among them is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Because it’s delivered “as a service” by a third-party company for a predictable monthly fee, DRaaS removes the need for investment capital in infrastructure, IT systems and software, and staffing. Critical data is replicated and stored away from your organization’s primary site, providing added levels of data security as well as recovery. The third-party vendor’s professional staff monitor and manage the entire DR activity around the clock, and conduct regular testing to ensure the solution works when and as needed.

The US Signal DRaaS Solution

Of course, not all DRaaS solutions are created equal. Some, like US Signal’s DRaaS solution, offer benefits that provide even greater value. US Signal’s DRaaS solution allows customers to access cloud resources to restore services in the event of an application or entire site failure quickly, securely and regardless of where their production environment is housed. It features continuous data protection (CDP) to minimize data loss should a disaster occur. Failovers can be initiated within minutes, and customers can select the point in time at which a test or failover recovers at the time of execution.

US Signal’s DRaaS solution is further supplemented by its other competitive strengths, including a strategically located network of data centers and cloud infrastructure that has been audited for PCI DSS and HIPAA compliance; the availability of a broad spectrum of IT services, and US Signal’s 24/7 Technical Operations Center.

Make Your Case with US Signal

Learn about the full range of data protection solutions, including DRaaS, US Signal offers at https://ussignal.com/data-protection. US Signal’s solution engineers and account managers can also assist you in developing a business case for DR planning, featuring the US Signal DRaaS solution and other services as appropriate to meet your company’s specific needs. Contact us by phone at 866.2. SIGNAL or by email at [email protected]