In an around-the clock business world, organizations need
nearly instantaneous failover and failback of critical business
applications. Disasters, and, more often, disruptions, do occur.
Hurricanes, tsunamis, flods and fies are to be feared and
accounted for in enterprise business continuity and disaster
recovery plans. However, organizations must also prepare for
the far more likely event of disruptions—the hardware failures,
security breaches and run-of-the-mill power outages that can
compromise access to business-critical applications.
A recent study by the Aberdeen Group indicates that,
depending on the maturity of their recovery operations,
organizations can experience up to 4.4 business disruptions
per year, with restore times ranging from one hour to more
than nine hours. The business cost of this downtime averages
$138,000 per hour.1 As noted in the 2012 IBM Global
Reputational Risk and IT Study2, brand damage is equally
signifiant: service disruption can harm an organization’s
reputation, especially in the online marketplace and in a world
where opinions are shaped by social media