Step 1: Getting Started

Once you have identified the most critical business processes, work with the business units to determine their availability requirements for each process. Documenting the requirements in an internal service-level agreement (SLA) and specifying the availability goals for each process helps you determine the value of a software investment used to improve availability. This information also helps you prioritize the processes to analyze. After documenting the service levels required, you can start analyzing the availability needs of each business process, technology by technology.

Step 2: Assess the Financial Impact—Calculate the Cost of Downtime

How much does downtime cost your business? The answer may not be as obvious as you think. Unexpected IT outages can unleash a procession of direct and indirect consequences, both short-term and far-reaching. The dollar amount that can be assigned to each hour of downtime varies widely, depending upon the nature of your business, the size of your company, and the criticality of your IT systems to primary revenue-generating processes.

Step 3: Uptime and Business Resiliency—It's All About Recovery

Following any unplanned outage, how quickly must you have the organization up and running as close to normal business operations as possible? Remember, every minute costs you. Take a look at your downtime cost per hour. Your recovery will depend on two objectives: your recovery time and your recovery point. These two measures will determine the optimum availability your organization will need.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines how quickly you need to restore applications and have them fully functional again. The faster your RTO requirement, the closer you move to zero interruption in uptime and the highest availability requirements.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the point at which the business absolutely cannot afford to lose data. It points to a place in each data stream where information must be available to put the application or system back in operation. Again, the closer you come to zero data loss and continuous real-time access, the higher availability you will require.

You may have different RTOs and RPOs for each business-critical applications. For example, a supply chain application feeding a production plant may require a recovery time of only a few minutes with minimal data loss.

Step 4: Select a Software Strategy for Successful Business Survival

When real-world costs of unplanned downtime are taken into account, an information availability solution is a cost-effective strategy for protecting businesses from serious injury. In particular, small to mid-sized businesses can benefit significantly from high availability solutions because they are generally more vulnerable to severe damage from unexpected outages and have fewer resources to stage a recovery.

A high availability solution shouldn't be beyond your budget. It shouldn't be hard work either. There are affordable, easy-to-manage solutions that provide significant benefits to small and mid-sized businesses by minimizing the risks and consequences posed by unexpected IT outages. A high availability solution offers these benefits:

• Lowers the risk of significant costs to business such as lost revenue, lost productivity, legal penalties, and brand damage caused by unplanned downtime.
• Protects business relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers by ensuring that applications and data will be available to satisfy their needs and unique schedules.
• Enforces SLAs by maintaining predictable RTOs and RPOs in the event of an IT outage.
• Enhances ROI on existing resources by assuring they will be available to generate revenue and support business processes.
• Ensures compliance with government and trade regulations by securing email and record retention requirements.

In Closing

Certainly, many internal and external factors drive the decision to adopt one business continuity model over another. Every company should perform a business impact analysis and a risk assessment to determine exposure and requirements across the business and then adopt a business continuity model that meets operational and financial objectives. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, "What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can."