Topics of Interest

Disaster Recovery

In a Small Business Administration (SBA) study of companies who experienced a catastrophic interruption to business:

24% never re-opened their doors
42% went out of business within one year 72% went out of business within two years

Disaster Recovery (DR) is defined as a company's ability to recover in an acceptable period of time (company recovery time objectives) from a major incident or disaster and to ensure that users, critical business systems, and mission critical data are efficiently restored, fully operational, and accessible.

Local site disasters are events that are limited to a specific location or room in a building and can result from fire, water, power or sabotage.

Site disasters are events that can impact a whole building and can result from fire, water, power or sabotage.

Area disasters are events that can impact the building and the near vicinity and can be caused by explosions, bombings, chemical or nuclear contamination, disease or terrorism, natural disasters, power, etc.

Data Loss Facts:

U.S. businesses lose over $12 billion per year because of data loss.
Hardware or system failure accounts for 78% of all data loss.
Human error accounts for 11% of all data loss.
Software corruption account for 7% of all data loss.
Natural disasters account for only 1% of all data loss.
More vital data is being stored in smaller spaces.
Instant access to electronic data has become more crucial in day-to-day business.
Disaster prevention and recovery plans are often overlooked or outdated.
Backup tools and techniques are not 100% reliable.
93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)
File corruption and data loss are becoming much more common, although loss of productivity continues to be the major cost associated with a virus disaster. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002)
The average company spends between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in total ramifications per year for desktop-oriented disasters (both hard and soft costs.) (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002)
In addition to being more prevalent, computer viruses were more costly, more destructive, and caused more real damage to data and systems than in the past. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002)
Of those companies participating in the 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey: 46% said each hour of downtime would cost their companies up to $50k, 28% said each hour would cost between $51K and $250K, 18% said each hour would cost between $251K and $1 million, 8% said it would cost their companies more than $1million per hour. (Source: Ontrack - 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001)
At what point is the survival of your company at risk? 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24 hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour. (Source: Ontrack - 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001)