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Emerging Trends

Cyber-threats, natural disasters and regulatory compliance are driving business continuity plans. What do you do when a disaster shuts down or destroys your company’s technology infrastructure?

Depending on which report you use, analysts call the answer to this question disaster preparedness, disaster recovery, business continuity or business resiliency.

Your company must answer to customers, employees and industry and governmental regulars, regardless of mundane or outlandish the problem. It doesn’t matter whether a construction crew severs your buildings power lines or a hurricane levels the city; you have to be prepared.

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. A virus attack can bring down your network as easily as a power outage, and an electrical fire or flood can be as devastating as high-profile vents like Hurricane Katrina. Worse, there’s no way to predict where and how the next catastrophe will strike.

In a recent survey conducted by Risk Solutions, LLC, 62% of respondents listed data security (virus, denial of service unauthorized access) as an extreme threat” to their business continuity, with power outages, telecom failure and datacenter failure close behind. Damage and downtime resulting from a disaster can have dramatic effects on a company’s bottom line. Every hour of downtime brings mounting costs, and the repercussions in terms of corporate reputation and customer retention may still be felt over the long term.

In another survey conducted by Contingency Planning and Management (CPM Group) and Deloitte & Touche, nearly half of respondents indicated that their businesses could not tolerate more than 8 hours of downtime and must have critical activities restored within that time frame. More than 12% indicated zero tolerance, demonstrating that resilience – the ability to bounce back quickly – is a must when creating a business continuity plan.

Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, the California Database Breach Notification Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the European Data Protection Directive will also drive additional focus on data protection and disaster preparedness. For compliance purposes, companies have to ensure that data is protected and archived according to established regulations.

Disaster preparedness dovetails nicely with this trend, giving companies an opportunity to add off-site storage to their data management initiatives and redundant power sources for their data centers.