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More than just a backup

Original article date: January 1996

So how much value do you put on your engineering data? How critical is your data to your business?

This is where disaster recovery comes in. Ask any company director whether his or her business is insured and the answer will be a puzzled “yes, of course”. Yet, ask if they have a disaster recovery policy and they may give a just-as-puzzled “no, what for?”

Disaster recovery services are often seen as an optional business strategy, rather than a fundamental requirement to ensure that business operations continue as usual. Anything, from a fire or flood, to a basic system fault, can bring about the failure of a company’s IT system, which in turn can mean that business operations grind to a halt. When a disaster does occur, and while insurance claims are being processed and replacement IT systems implemented, how does a company maintain its business operation?

One of the largest disaster recovery companies in the UK is Guardian Computer Services, which earns around £20 million per annum providing backup hardware and communications facilities for around 750 companies. In some cases, companies which invoke the policy are given alternative premises to work from while their existing ones are restored to their former state. In other cases, a mobile disaster recovery vehicle takes the replacement facilities to the site and could be set up as an alternative working environment in the car park, for example. Over 20 clients have invoked their disaster recovery services since January 1996.

In a recent survey of 25 city firms, nearly one in four said they were sufficiently worried about the cessation of the IRA ceasefire to change their DR policy. But in the same survey, two-thirds said that, over the last year, their computer systems had been unavailable for use at least once. This high proportion gave hardware failure as the most common problem, followed by network failure and software failure. Guardian director Roland Mann says: “Although we have clients unfortunate enough to have needed our services after terrorist bombings, about 90% of invocations are the result of computer system failures caused by a variety of events, from staff deleting the wrong files, plumbing leaks drenching equipment, to faults in the air conditioning system”.

Clients are of all sizes. Minimum contract prices are surprisingly low. Yet the total market in the UK for contract backup facilities is perhaps no more than £100 million. Of course, there is probably getting on for £1 billion in the market accounted for by in-house disaster recovery Ð companies such as the major banks and building societies which maintain complete mirror sites of their whole IT setup.

So many companies go to great lengths to protect their financial data and to ensure that they can be up and running again within a short space of time. An example of an engineering company which uses Guardian’s disaster recovery service to protect its financial and sales activities is Xerox Engineering Systems. A hardware fault last January cost the company one day of operational time, when without disaster recovery, there could have been several weeks’ downtime. The on-site recovery system was operational for over four weeks.

But shouldn’t there be more of a market for disaster recovery amongst manufacturing companies seeking to maintain continuity in design and development? How important is it to have your manufacturing data, as opposed to financial data, back on line within one or two days, should the unthinkable happen?

“It’s all about response time”, says Mike Quinn, Sales & Marketing Director of Guardian Computer Services. “If you need to be up and running with seconds or minutes, there’s no alternative to running your own on-site backup, but it’s very expensive. We come into our own when you need to be up and running within a time frame of 12 to 48 hours. But if you can survive for a week or two without your IT system, then you don’t need the services we offer.” Quinn is yet to be convinced that there is a lucrative market for disaster recovery in the manufacturing arena. But it could certainly be argued that times are changing.

Pressures on companies to complete design and development projects within tight schedules are increasing. Time-to-market is increasingly recognised as a critical parameter contributing to profitability. A company which is six months late getting a product to market can close off over half of its life cycle profits, surveys show.

Companies offering design and development services on a contract basis, as well as second and third tier suppliers to major industries such as automotive are all under great pressure to design to a tight timescale, often with penalty clauses hanging over them for late delivery. Design departments are beginning to think about 24 hour working, where projects are passed around the globe, following the sun, with continuous work on projects by teams on three continents. Such a policy is being adopted by Kvaerner John Brown, which has implemented 24 hour working with minimised shift or overtime rates. Through this system, a customer’s plant can be completed and be on-stream earlier, generating more revenue for the customer. Yet it costs Kvaerner John Brown less to do the work and they can get paid more by negotiating a cut of the extra revenues.

A recent agreement between Guardian and Silicon Graphics for UNIX workstations implies an increasing move into the manufacturing sector. Recovery services for PC LAN users are also offered to incorporate client/server functionality into a full IT recovery plan.

“SGI has a significant base of clients in the manufacturing sector, an area which is becoming increasingly IT-dependent”, says Peter MacLean, Guardian’s Managing Director. “With pressure mounting to meet increasingly tight deadlines, particularly where just-in-time manufacturing procedures are applied, even a temporary loss of the system can be catastrophic. It is essential that contingency planning is factored into the overall business strategy.”

Many companies believe that disaster recovery arrangements form part of their existing maintenance agreements, but it is unlikely that this is the case, according to Guardian. The Guardian service includes regular opportunities to do trials on the backup facilities available. ” Unlike fire-safety checks which hardly vary, business continuity plans need to be continually updated every time a new dimension is added to the business Ð whether it’s a new piece of equipment or a new person. We often find that companies do not carry out trials frequently enough, even though it is included as part of our package”, says Mann. “When they do, we frequently find unexpected problems, such as an incomplete set of backup data, when the company assumed it had been protecting its data absolutely.”

Some critical questions

  • 1 Have you assessed the effect of an interruption on your business?
  • 2 Have you accurately identified the critical areas of your business?
  • 3 Do you have an audited contingency plan drawn up? If so, are you confident of its viability and is the plan frequently tested under simulated disaster conditions?
  • 4 Does your plan guarantee full recovery within a timeframe agreed to be acceptable to the business, whatever the cause of failure?

January 1996

Added on 1 January 2009 at 2:27 pm | Read more general articles