A growing number of organizations are facing a radical shift in value that emphasizes knowledge over the delivery of products and services.  This change highlights the critical nature of access to an organization’s data assets.

Information technology (IT) systems that broker the delivery of business information provide enormous value, but they also introduce a vulnerability. If access to vital data is interrupted, the organization suffers. At a minimum, outages to IT systems can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue, lost productivity, and legal issues.

At the extreme, a sustained outage can threaten the viability of an organization. According to the Gartner Group, “two out of every five enterprises that experience a disaster go out of business within five years.” (Gartner, Disaster Recovery Plans and Systems are Essential, Robert Witty, Donna Scott, September 2001).  A study by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. shows that if a disaster causes companies to lose their data centers for 10 or more days, 50 percent of those companies will file for bankruptcy almost immediately following the loss. Another 43 percent will file for bankruptcy within a year of the loss.

It no longer requires a tremendous stretch of the imagination to envision scenarios that can cripple an organization’s technology assets. Tornados, catastrophic fires, flooding due to a plumbing malfunction, sustained power outages, as well as a host of internal operational vulnerabilities such as hardware failures and employee errors, threaten both large and small businesses every day. No matter how unlikely it may seem today, every organization must face the near certainty of a business-wide failure of IT systems occurring at a future date. Anticipating these events and planning corrective courses of action is now a prerequisite to business success.

Preparing an organization for the unexpected is the domain of business continuity planning (BCP). The specific preparations taken by an IT group to ensure continuous access to information resources is a subset of BCP known as disaster recovery planning (DRP).

An important part of BCP is the procurement of a highly compatible disaster recovery site which can serve as a backup data center should a disaster cause the loss of the business’s primary facilities, servers, or processors.

Business continuity is one of the areas in which Underwood & Associates specializes. This is carried out principally in three ways. First of all, its consultants regularly help banks and other businesses develop a highly qualified and customized business continuity plan. Such a plan is the first step in becoming prepared for every kind of emergency or disaster.  Something as simple as a hardware failure or as catastrophic as a major fire or tornado can descend upon any business at any time.

Through education and careful planning, U&A helps its clients to be prepared in the event they should face one of these problems.

Secondly, Underwood & Associates offers a program whereby one of its consultants becomes the leader of the disaster recovery team. He helps the bank or business work through the thorny problems involved in the development of a competent business continuity plan, and he assumes the task of employee training relative to business continuity. He helps the business perform a business continuity test at least annually. And finally, in the event of a major service disruption, he assume a great deal of the responsibility for executing the applicable provisions of the plan. As computers and software systems become more capable and more complex, it no longer enough to have compatible equipment and work space at an alternate location. The most obvious need now is not so much for equipment and offsite work space, but for people resources with knowledge and experience. With so much work to be done in the area of information systems, it is very difficult for smaller banks and businesses to have even one person who is thoroughly trained and ready to become the project leader in the event of a real disaster. With this program, a bank or business can add some very valuable expertise and experience to its business continuity team.

Last, but not least, since 1994, Underwood & Associates, Inc. has operated a Disaster Recovery/Contingency center for banks and other businesses in the state of Georgia using IBM midrange hardware . Being located in the geographic center of the state, U&A is within easy driving distance of almost any city in the state. Each year we help those institutions which subscribe to this service carry out a disaster recovery test. This test can now be carried out by the bank remotely using our secure and encrypted VPN. The results of these tests are documented in a detailed report and provided to the client business or bank. Though many companies offer disaster recovery, U&A has been doing it longer than most, and we think better than most. Also, we only serve institutions within the state of Georgia because we do not believe its a good idea to rely on a hot site which is not conveniently accessible.

Is the availability of your information systems assets at risk? Lean on Underwood & Associates, and sleep better at night knowing that your valuable data resources have a home away from home should they ever need one.