Blog

The COVID-19 crisis is forcing businesses across the globe to adapt to sudden operational disruption. IT, tasked with supporting the rapid, largely unplanned move to remote work, is truly on the front lines of the
effort to adapt day-to-day ops to a “socially distant” economy. 

Existing disaster recovery (DR) plans simply didn’t envision this type of scenario. The most common way to conceptualize the “disaster” in IT DR is a physical threat to your technology infrastructure: events like a flood, fire, or a storm that destroys key servers. In this context, businesses need a plan for scaling up alternative infrastructure as fast as possible. 

When there is a natural extreme weather condition, like a snowstorm or flooding, often businesses come to a standstill. In 2017 alone, the US was impacted by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). All of that added up and crossed $300 billion in damages in 2017, a new annual record.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is no longer about what will it cost you to recover and rebuild your IT systems. With growing business immediacy and complex interdependencies of IT systems, the question has rightly shifted to what will it cost you if you cannot recover your systems. There’s considerable interest in drawing up a Disaster Recovery template for a business, which is effectively a plan to get the business back on its feet in the face of disaster.

Guest blog by John Hamel, Principal, TurningPoint Systems

Prolonged downtime is every manufacturing firm’s nightmare. Even companies running the highly-reliable IBM i OS recognize they need some sort of disaster recovery plan in place to protect their business from major disruptions.