Submitted by Heidi Gabrielson, NetScout Product Marketing Manager
This is a decade marked by catastrophic natural disasters – ferocious hurricanes (Katrina, Rita and most recently, Gustav and Ike), the deadliest US tornado season in a decade, mega earthquakes in China and other parts of Asia, widespread flooding all over the world and even a devastating tsunami.
In addition, it has also been a time where we have seen significant manmade disruptions, including a variety of power interruptions – from rolling brown outs on the West Coast to a multi-day power outage that hit the Northeast and Canada – broad-scale internet outages, cyber attacks and even terrorist activities. As such, government and business planners worldwide are placing new emphasis on planning for the unexpected.
According to the Forrester/Disaster Recovery Journal October 2007 Global Disaster Recovery Preparedness Online Survey, 76% of companies have declared a disaster or experienced a major business disruption in the past five years.
What is the impact of business continuity loss? It can range from revenue loss, productivity loss, failure to meet compliance regulations, customer attrition, lowered shareholder confidence and diminished brand value.
The cost of downtime can scale to millions of dollars per hour, not including downstream loss of revenue as customers leave after being forced to source new suppliers.
Our question to you is, “Do you have a contingency plan in place for your performance management system?”
Only a small portion of declared disasters are of the catastrophic type. The most common cause of a business disruption is a power failure, followed by IT hardware failures and network failures (Forrester Research). However, you can easily position your enterprise for prompt recovery from these “every day” type of disruptions with a little forethought.
Using the nGenius Standby Server, you can maintain situational awareness during an event by keeping close tabs on network and application activity, showing which systems and applications are online, which sites and users can continue to conduct business, and how business services are performing on backup or redundant networks and systems.
All too often, network continuity has been given little thought or just taken for granted. Was your business recently affected by hurricanes Gustav or Ike? How did you handle it? Were you prepared? Let us know what worked for your company.
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