Business continuity and disaster recovery

Small and midsize businesses face challenges in acquiring business continuity and disaster recovery services says Gartner analyst Roberta Witty in a November 2005 report: "SMBs Must Raise Awareness of Importance of Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plans." Reasons include inadequate resources to provide a 'good enough' job with disaster recovery; failure of SMB management to focus on what they may see as hypothetical disaster scenarios; absence of multiple facilities to use as offsite recovery sites.

SMBs must make management realize that "having a business continuity plan in place will ultimate cost less than not having one," said Witty. One persuasive activity recommended is to perform an informal business impact analysis, risk assessment and tabletop test.

Hong Kong organizations do well against global standards for security and business continuity practices. Offsite data backup can straddle the Hong Kong-mainland border. "Local companies affiliated with Chinese companies across the border make strategic decisions to deploy shared datacenters and telco links," said Lo. "Drawbacks like high running costs, cultural and language obstacles, less stable electricity supplies do not prevent collaboration through strategic corporate networks. Where cross-border networks are less cost-effective than is desired, the usual policy is to prioritize the most critical data operations and storage functions and expand from that base."

Statistics show that 30 percent to 60 percent of all backup jobs do not complete successfully, says Lin. "The most common problems for companies backing up straight from disk to tape are firstly, failure of backup due to errors such as changes to administrator password, directory path name and keying typos and secondly, backup is 'aborted' when the time window for the job has been exceeded. This is a business risk unknown to many managements."