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Business Continuity Plans vs. Disaster Recovery Plans
Neither big or small organizations can afford downtime in their data center operations. The losses due to downtime has jumped to almost $138,000 on an hourly basis in 2012, which is 3 times more than the loss calculated in the initial days of data center usages way back in 2004, when the figures were just around $42,000 an hour.
Taking the downtime factor out of your operational formula is impossible because, even if you have the necessary resources, Mother Nature can still be an issue that you will have to deal with. The recent examples of Hurricane Sandy and the devastating Japanese Earthquake are testimonials to this fact.
Therefore, as far as businesses are concerned, ensuring business continuity is vital and this calls for radical steps. But you should not confuse a business continuity plan with a disaster recovery plan since these are two different concepts that ensure data protection.
Disaster recovery is just a piece of the bigger business continuity plan. The aim of disaster recovery is to ensure that your data is restored after an unexpected disaster in your data center facility.
On the other hand, business continuity combines all efforts and managerial principles that are involved in making sure that key business functions like IT, resource management, and finance are not impacted in the event of a disaster. Without a business continuity plan, it would be very difficult for organizations to get things back to normal. As IBM pointed out in 2011, nearly 43 percent of companies experiencing a big data loss never reopen their business because disaster recovery alone cannot undo the damage that has been done.
So foresight and planning for inevitable threats and determining the impact of disasters on your facilities are quite important to ensure continuity. In other words, your data center operations need to have a business continuity plan if they are to survive significant downtime threats.
Entrusting your facility operations to a reliable data center service provider like Lifeline Data Centers can certainly help you considerably reduce downtime concerns in your operations. Take a quick look at our services and our client testimonials.