Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan

Business Continuity is not something that is implemented at the time of a disaster – Business Continuity refers to those activities performed daily to maintain service, consistency, and recoverability.

There is a serious disconnect in the way organizations plan for outages. When they do, 90% of Business Continuity budgets are targeted at catastrophic disasters rather than the more frequently occurring clinical events which include malicious attacks, viruses and more commonly human error. Millions of dollars of quantifiable losses occur due to clinical events. In fact, 50% of outages turn out to be power or plumbing related.

Stakeholders and regulatory agencies will not tolerate poor planning, and unexplained compliance failures are unacceptable. While there is traditionally more empathy for the catastrophic disaster, it has less than 1% chance of occurring. On average, 50% of organizations’ critical applications have a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 12 hours, yet the majority of businesses do not employ high availability solutions.

Hosting.com recommends organizations invest and focus tighter recovery time objectives (RTO) on their mission-critical applications that are subject to outages due to highly-probable clinical events.