Do more with less. Who hasn’t already heard that in business? And just because something – like disaster recovery planning and management – is vital to ensuring enterprise survival does not mean that you cannot leverage your investment to get more out of it.
The more DRP and DRM can help you increase profits or cut costs, without sacrificing disaster recovery effectiveness, the safer your DR budget will be. Here are a few ideas.
Quality assurance. Disaster recovery plans must be tested in realistic ways. Otherwise, you cannot rely on them, which means you might as well not make them. But a DR test environment can also be used to test the impact of patches and upgrades before they are applied. This helps ensure that if a planned change to a system makes it crash, you’ll either fix it beforehand or at least have DR capable of recovering the system afterwards.
Server/VM rightsizing. How many virtual machines or servers can you unplug or disconnect before disaster recovery is necessary? In a test environment (don’t do this in production!), you may find that you are running more redundant resources than you thought. Paring down to what you really need, while making sure you still have a robust infrastructure, can save money on licence, maintenance, and cloud service costs, accordingly.
Confidence in your IT security. While thinking has shifted largely from “if” to “when” in terms of security breaches, knowing you are fully prepared to deal rapidly and effectively with breaches is important. DR exercises in test environments with simulated hacks and malware infections can help. You may also uncover vulnerabilities you didn’t know you had, allowing you to fix them before attackers arrive, not after.
A sales argument to win business. The more confident you are in your disaster recovery, and the better documented it is for presentation to customers, the greater your chances of winning bids and new business. Business continuity and cyber security are now important supplier selection criteria for many other companies, and sound DRP is a crucial component of both.