Do you see business continuity and disaster recovery preparedness (BC/DR) as a cost center? Or do you regard it as a business driver?
How you answer matters: enterprises of all kinds are in the midst of a profound digital transformation as you — and your competitors — seek to efficiently gather, store, and analyze the data necessary for the business to achieve peak performance.
When that data and/or the networks, systems, and applications it feeds are not functioning properly, you can end up with an expensive disruption. And when you regard BC/DR as a cost center rather than a business driver, you’re exposing your business to a higher rate of failure.
How susceptible is your digital infrastructure?
Many enterprises, notably those conducting commerce online, often rely on infrastructures that simply didn’t exist even a few years ago: public cloud/multi-cloud storage and on-premises systems configured into a complicated microservices architecture that manipulates immense amounts of data and can scale in response to demand — and which is more susceptible than ever to something going wrong.
If your technology infrastructure isn’t already on this path, competitive pressures will soon push it there as demand for data and the capabilities necessary to leverage it keep growing.
The costs of business disruption
What’s more, when something goes wrong digitally, you will pay plenty. The average cost of downtime across all industries and organizational sizes now stands at $250,000 per hour, a figure that rises dramatically for very large financial firms.
And if this strikes you as so much hyperbole, consider these recent findings:
- 50% of organizations could not survive a disaster event;
- 84% experienced a malicious cyberattack in the last 12 months (that they know of), and 93% of those attacks caused data corruption or data loss; and
- Of the 91% who have experienced tech-related business disruption in the past two years, 18% suffered “severe” impacts, 26% saw permanent loss of customers, and 28% endured major reputational damage.
BC/DR as a business opportunity
What makes your enterprise technologically resilient is, in the end, unique to your enterprise (more about that in my next blog post).
But at least one generality holds: senior decision-makers who don’t correlate the availability/quality of data with organizational success tend to exhibit less interest in paying for the technological resilience that underpins business resilience.
And they tend to see BC/DR as a cost center rather than an opportunity to boost the organization’s competitiveness with ongoing investment in the highly managed and optimized resilience practices so critical to supporting the technology infrastructure capabilities on which their future depends.
