Despite being essential for business continuity, some businesses still do not have proper disaster recovery tools and plans. And bizarrely, the main problem could be down to two words – ‘disaster recovery’.
Stop talking about disasters
When it comes to strategic investments, senior stakeholder makers make most of their decisions based on risk. Those factors which present the greatest risk are the ones that receive priority funding. The lower the risk, the less money allocated – or potentially none at all.
And this is where ‘disaster recovery’ is becoming a problematic phrase. “Disaster” is associated with the very worst possible incidents – fire, terrorist attack, extensive flooding etc. The sort of occurrences that take your business off-line because the office has been destroyed.
From a risk analysis perspective, these disasters are statistically quite rare. As a result, decision-makers feel quite safe – and do not understand the importance of DR technologies.
Disasters are mundane
The reality is that show-stopping disasters tend to be more mundane; a crucial accounts spreadsheet is corrupted, a sales order is deleted, a server fails taking line-of-business applications offline. These events are incredibly common – and have severe implications for your organisation.
But at the same time, these events are familiar – your senior management team will know what effect these incidents have.
Instead of talking about disaster recovery, you must frame discussions in terms of IT recovery. This means talking about the frequent, low-level incidents that cause production bottlenecks – and how to recover operations as quickly as possible.
By highlighting the events that really will happen, you can present a true picture of the risks your business faces. Equipped with this understanding, your decision-makers will be more open to discussions about DR investment.
Focus on the benefits
As well as avoiding the ‘D’ word, your discussions must highlight the benefits of a specialised IT recovery solution. This will help stakeholders better understand the return on investment, including:
- Delivering a better customer experience – if your systems are always available, you can always serve your customers.
- Maintain or improve revenue – by accelerating recovery times, costly downtime is reduced – or eliminated with proper fail-over processes.
- Uphold SLAs and compliance obligations – your business has internal and external commitments, often associated with data protection and availability. IT recovery processes and technology ensure you can meet both those requirements.
By tying these benefits to the specific strategic goals of your stakeholders, you can better ‘sell’ the need for an IT recovery strategy and accompanying technologies.
Provide a specific solution
As well as defining risks and benefits, your discussions should also highlight a specific potential solution. This may be a system that is operated in-house, or a third-party managed service depending on your appetite for risk and available resources.
Ultimately, you are trying to simplify the decision-making process for your stakeholders. Presenting a complete argument strengthens your case and reduces the opportunity for managers to reject your IT recovery proposals.
To learn more about building an effective case for IT recovery, and the technology solutions that will help you better protect your operations against loss and outage, please get in touch.