Disaster Recovery Can Cover Your ASPs
September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Disaster recovery planning can be fun, depending on your mindset. As Hurricane Florence was heading for the Carolinas, we watched the storm with great interest before landfall and worried for a little while there the simulations of the ensuing tropical storm showed that it was going to hook a little to the west and – I kid you not – go right over Guild Companies headquarters here in Boone, North Carolina. A high developed over the Ohio Valley and bounced the storm to the south and west a little, and we did not get 80 mph winds as expected, although we did get 8 inches of rain in two days.
None of this was all that bad, but we spent a lot of time preparing for the storm and it was fun as well as being useful. We are now more ready for a disaster if one should strike, even though one did not this time. More companies should think about their IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans in this way, we think. Embrace it, and cover your ASPs – that’s auxiliary storage pools, of course.
There are good reasons to be prepared, as we discuss in myriad ways here at The Four Hundred. According to a survey of 875 companies in North America done by Janco Associates, the quality of disaster recovery and business continuity plans has improved, and recent hurricane and flooding events show this, and moreover, that 19 percent of those surveyed by Janco actually activated part of the disaster recovery/business continuity plan in the past twelve months. Here is a chart that shows the breakdown of those activations by type:
The distribution of reasons for activating those DR/BC plans is interesting, and clearly there is a slight change in the quality of the plans based on the slightly lower incidence of failure causes in this study comparing 2017’s events to those from 2018.
Janco sells DR/BC templates as part of a 250 page workbook to help companies establish their plans; these have over 3,100 customers, and they cost $999. The data culled from its surveys are not specific to the IBM i market, which may have a better reputation when it comes to DR/BC preparations and success rates. It would be very interesting to compare and contrast platforms, but even two companies in the same business with different computing platforms might do things so differently as to make comparisons difficult. Even those in the same business with the same platform might have wildly skewed results.
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