Archive for month: February, 2018

A revenue generating system such as an e-commerce website has direct financial consequences when it goes down. Non-revenue generating systems such as your email service may have indirect costs when it fails such as the inability to send invoices to your customers. Either way a system outage is bad for business and must be mitigated through careful contingency planning.

Organisations must have a disaster recovery plan in place so when the inevitable happens they are able to recover swiftly and thereby reduce the business impact and cost.

Unplanned outages are not a rare occurrence

This infographic shows 47% of companies experienced and outage of downtime in the last year and 95% of these outages were unrelated to natural disasters such as fire or flood.

Research conducted by Zerto shows there are many root causes for unplanned outages. These include hardware failures, environmental failures, human error and cybercrime.

Hardware failures

According to the research conducted by Zerto, hardware failures such as failures in the electrical supply or uninterrupted power supplies accounted for approximately 31% of reported outages in 2016.

These outages would have affected entire IT environments due to the loss of power to all systems. In addition, power failures in IT environments often result in data loss and data corruption.

The downtime impact the business’s revenue stream. Compounding this is the time, effort and cost of recovering from such an event that can be a substantial hit to the bottom line.

Cybercrime

Cybercrime accounted for 22% of outages in 2016 according to Zerto. Ransomware as a category has grown exponentially from 3.2 million incidents in 2014 to over 638 million incidents in 2016.

Earlier ransomware malware variants usually affected individual end users so the impact was limited unless the users inadvertently infected and encrypted an organisation’s file server. Newer variants can now affect entire networks by propagating through vulnerabilities on unpatched computers.

Either way, the impact of a cybercrime incident such as ransomware resulting in a system outage has both direct and indirect costs. Organisations with no effective disaster recovery solutions have paid millions in ransom.

If you add the losses due to the downtime to these numbers, the financial impact is substantial.

The human error factor

The research conducted by Zerto reported that human error accounted for 22% of unplanned outages in 2016.

As with other causes of unplanned outages these may have been environment wide and could have taken days to recover from. For example, a systems administrator applying an untested patch to several production servers may have resulted in data loss or data corruption.

Entire systems may have needed to be rebuilt and restored which would have had a financial impact due to the loss in productivity and availability.

Environmental incidents

Environmental factors such as water, heat, CRAC failures accounted for 11% of outages reported in 2016 according to Zerto. These types of outages would also be system wide.

Depending on the damage, the time to recover from these types of events could be significant due to the damage caused. Recovery times for these environmental incidents could be days or even weeks.

The business impact from being offline for such a prolonged period would be catastrophic.

The cost of each hour of downtime

According to Zerto research, one hour of downtime has a substantial financial impact to businesses of all sizes when factoring all of the various impacts, costs and losses.

For small businesses, each hour of downtime costs $8,000 on average.

For mid-tier organisations, each hour of downtime costs $74,000 on average.

For large enterprises, each hour of downtime can cost $700,000 on average.

Conclusion

Unplanned outages are clearly a threat to any organisation. Disaster recovery solutions should not only be undertaken to meet a compliance obligation. The costs of unplanned outages are real and affect the profitability and sustainability of businesses.

Organisations must invest in a robust and scalable disaster recovery solution which is able to ensure business continuity.

Careful consideration must be given to the Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) to ensure data loss and operational downtime is kept to a minimum to meet business uptime objectives..

Find out more information about Zettagrid disaster ecovery solutions by visiting the Zettagrid Indonesia website.

The unavailability of tools such as Trello, Slack, Adobe Cloud and Grammarly crippled the creative industry during the widespread outage. Equally, even Microsoft’s Office 365 recently left European users unable to access Exchange Online leaving many unable to access their email accounts. Meanwhile, security breaches at Equifax have left their reputation in tatters.

These are just a few examples of high-profile incidents that have highlighted how any business can go offline and become invisible to their customers at any moment in time. In a world of endless options, fickle users will then visit your competitor. These are the inconvenient truths that businesses are facing and why reputation is increasingly topping the list of business priorities.

However, to prepare for the unexpected and the inevitable impact on your business to ensure that all IT services are up and running within minutes is much easier than you might think. The days of needing expensive secondary data centers, duplicate IT equipment and lengthy wait periods interrupting your operations and impacting your business are thankfully behind us.The problems of having an always online business are well documented. But how to achieve the elusive business resiliency and disaster recovery strategy is a topic that often leaves more questions than answers.

Understanding that business continuity is critical to your commercial survival is the first step that will set your organisation on the road to stability. With SecondSite, we provide an affordable real-time replication solution that will seamlessly integrate into your disaster recovery plan.

Rather than having one single point of failure, we replicate your virtualised IT environment into Zettagrid’s cloud and do the heavy lifting for you. Failing over to a different zone takes away the risk and ensures that all services remain online until your primary site recovers.

The most attractive feature for IT departments is that users will be blissfully unaware that you have failed over into the cloud. Rather than wasting time managing communications or appeasing key stakeholders with regular updates, IT can concentrate on resolving the issues at hand while its business as usual for everyone else.

Although many organisations already have a disaster recovery plan, recovering from a backup is traditionally a painful and time-consuming process. In an always-online economy, businesses no longer have the luxury of going offline in a world where time is the new currency.

Ensuring that data synchronisation, accessibility, and a recovery site is in place for your virtual environment is the new belts and braces approach required to increase the availability of all services and applications. But, there is much more to achieving business resiliency than having a virtual get out of jail free card when disaster strikes.

Ensuring that you can determine and communicate compliance across your company, boardroom or even auditors is equally as important. Regular reports that highlight exactly what information and applications are always available is one of the most important aspects of achieving high availability and amazing business resiliency.

A neglected recovery plan that is tested or revisited every few years has never been an effective strategy. Equally having all your eggs in one basket whether it be in-house or cloud only is also a recipe for disaster.

The secret sauce to effective business resilience is having the ability to deploy, test and recover faster when the inevitable happens. It is imperative that any real-time disaster recovery replication solution should replicate into multiple zones to avoid going offline in an always-online digital world.

It has become crucial to understand the costs and implications of downtime during an outage. We understand that the top of businesses wish lists will be a scalable and quick disaster recovery solution that is both reliable and affordable for organisations of any size.

Can you say with confidence that your operations will be free from interruption for the foreseeable future? Is your organisation’s productivity and reputation safe from harm? And are you prepared for a disaster?

Zettagrid’s award-winning Disaster Recovery Solutions is bringing much-needed innovation to the disaster recovery space to efficiently deliver organisational resilience. But what are your experiences and insights in this area? We would love to have a conversation to understand what challenges your business is facing and how we can help you overcome them.

Find out more information about Disaster Recovery Solutions by visiting the Zettagrid Indonesia website.