Disaster Recovery - Avoiding Catastrophic Losses

Let's talk about Disaster Recovery (DR) for a moment. I was talking with a customer about how he's managing his business in these tight times. He said that down-time cost the business about $100,000 US per hour, and that the level of impact in a tight economy felt like it was even more than that. Do you have a cost figure for down time? Is there a defined point where you call in your insurance company because down-time has become a catastrophic loss? What an awful time. Whether it's a bad disk controller, a flood, or lightning hitting the CPU (yes - that happened) a good plan is a great thing.

Why blog about this? Well, an outage gets to be longer if there is no standby system, or if key users cannot reconnect to it quickly. We have seen outages get longer when simple human error overwrites a disk or misplaces a backup. A good set of written procedures and some well-designed recovery-scenario automation scripts sure help to keep a bad thing from going to a catastrophe.

Here's a question for you - if your Disaster Recovery plan aims to reduce the impact of outages, is there also a section that looks at staying reasonably up to date on your key software releases as a way to avoid the business impact of hitting a known fixed problem? An expensive outage that was avoidable is the unkindest disaster of all.

OpenEdge databases have a very solid reputation with our customers, but "things do happen". Why not schedule a walkthrough of  your Disaster Recovery plan and a check on the release notes for new service packs to see if there are opportunities to prevent or minimize any potential problems?