Protecting your business against system downtime costs

23 January 2006

Dennis Samuel, area VP, South-east Asia and India, NCR-Teradata Division, says Business continuity processes must ensure business operability and accessibility along with recoverability and performance continuity. Exclusive to domain-b.

A million dollars an hour is what IT system downtime costs American business according to the META group. This is a stunning figure until one considers the degree to which modern businesses rely on IT systems. Much of the value of these systems is derived from the mountains of business intelligence stored in today's sophisticated data warehouses.

Companies that once used their data warehouse only to support strategic business analysis are now using "active" data warehousing to support nearly every core business function.

As such, it is not surprising that when the system is unavailable, companies are at enormous financial risk. Lost revenue, reduced employee productivity, and regulatory penalties can all contribute to direct costs and the reputation of the business.

In that context, a million dollars an hour sounds about right, though it remains a disturbing number and highlights the need for companies to protect their critical business systems. The best solution for this problem is to have two production systems that are both up, operational and available to manage routine workloads. Using this configuration, the second system is also available if the first system becomes unavailable or the system's performance is degraded. This type of configuration is commonly referred to as a "dual system".

Three core challenges of business continuity:
The first challenge is system and data availability. Because the stakes are so high, companies must ensure that when downtime of any kind occurs, integral systems remain operational and data accessible.

The second concern is system recoverability. Can your customers wait for weeks for your business to recover? Will they?