Disaster Recovery: Handle With Care

The terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, got businesses large and small to think about disaster recovery. Hurricane Katrina, just a year ago, then pushed many to get serious about adopting those plans.

Still, many solution providers expected disaster-recovery solutions to continue to be a hard sell in the small- and midsize-business segment. But now, falling product costs along with new technology, new services, and even new business pressures are opening the doors for solution providers to boost sales of disaster-recovery solutions to their SMB customers.

Even more important, the combination of high-profile disasters, regulatory and compliance issues, fiduciary responsibility and other business concerns has taken away every excuse solution providers may have for not bringing disaster-recovery solutions to customers of every size.

Businesses are more aware now of the interdependencies of their equipment and how a problem with one impacts another, said Michael Croy, director of business-continuity solutions at Forsythe Solutions Group, a solution provider in Skokie, Ill. And, he said, they are looking for a return on investment from disaster recovery. Investments in this space used to be a black hole for companies, Croy said, but not anymore. "Now customers want to invest in disaster recovery and business continuity not only to recover from a disaster but to improve IT performance and resiliency."

For small and midsize businesses, disaster recovery is a balance between cost and risk, said Steven Robb, vice president and general manager at LaSalle Business Solutions, Rosemont, Ill. "They know they need it," he said, but the ever-present question has always been, can they afford it?

>> Gone are the days when a disaster recovery plan meant companies had to pay for idle equipment sitting off-site somewhere.

Some simple questions open the doors at such businesses, said Eryck Bredy, president of Bredy Network Management, Woburn, Mass., which has seen its disaster-recovery business growing at 45 percent per year for the past few years. "I'll ask, 'Are you at all concerned about what happens in a disaster?' " Bredy said. " 'Do you have a fallback plan?' If they are a public company, I ask them what they tell their shareholders. That gets the conversation rolling."

Those questions are important. The most basic of disaster-recovery plans mainly focus on ensuring that data is backed up to somewhere other than in the building where the client has its servers. However, solution providers looking to protect clients in a disaster also need to know whether those clients have quick access to alternative sites and equipment in case their building is damaged, how easy it is to rebuild their server and data environments, or whether they can get quick access to alternative voice and data communications channels. Most importantly, they need to know how much downtime they can stand before their business suffers and how much it will cost to meet their recovery requirements.

LOWER COSTS, MORE BUSINESS
Falling costs have certainly made it easier to implement disaster recovery, said Gordon McKemie, owner of Ohio Valley Storage Consultants in Anchorage, Ky. McKemie said a complete disaster- recovery data replication that 10 years ago took four years and cost $240 million was recently done for a local bank that already had a metro Ethernet circuit in four days for about $140,000, or less than the annual maintenance contract of the two EMC arrays that were replaced, McKemie said. "And at the same time, the customer got information life-cycle management and met compliance issues," he said.

Lower costs have caused Chi's disaster-recovery business to double over the past two years, now accounting for up to 40 percent of the company's revenue, said Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, a 15-employee VAR in Cleveland. "We don't run into bandwidth issues," he said. "Software is available to replicate only sector-level changes in data, so replication utilizes less bandwidth. And most midsize companies already have T1 lines, so they don't need new bandwidth."

Also, small and midsize companies that for business reasons have already adopted technologies such as server and storage virtualization, data duplication, and the ability to securely share storage devices among multiple users are finding they can implement disaster recovery at little extra cost.