When it comes to business continuity, the T word most often in mind for many companies is not terrorism; it's technology and a company's potential vulnerability. Risks include Internet viruses, loss of telephone lines and electrical power and other network outages caused by faulty equipment, employee sabotage or error and a host of other potential events that could interrupt doing business via the Web or over an intranet.
While companies are certainly alert to the possibility of another Sept. 11, they are just as much driven these days by the recognition of how dependent they have become on technology and the potential impact a computer network shutdown can have on their ability to conduct business. "Since people really started doing business online, there is much, much more of a concern about being up, on and available seven days a week," says Vickie Malis, vice president of marketing for the off-site data protection unit of Iron Mountain Inc., the world's largest records and information management company. "Information is a corporate asset." And assets have to be protected.
One approach to keeping records and data safe, upon which Iron Mountain's business model was originally premised, is to send the duplicative material to another location entirely. The best practice is "off-site, off-line and out of reach," says Malis.
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Regularly, Iron Mountain hears cautionary tales from businesses that kept computer backup tapes in a safe in their building and then couldn't reach them for two days after a water main breaks, or from companies that had their backup tapes wiped out when the IT employee who was keeping them in his car trunk inadvertently parked in a magnetic field.
Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Malis' company was able to deliver contingency tapes to its customers, despite the grounding of air traffic. The Boston-based company used a pony express of trucks to ferry tapes to recovery sites across the country. In fact, every day, unmarked trucks owned by Iron Mountain head for 57 discreet sites around the nation with a cargo of magnetic tapes containing data potentially worth billions to U.S. corporations.
But business continuity is extending well beyond this kind of disaster recovery. While tape storage relates to the recovery portion of a company's business continuity plan, the other piece–"high availability," or the ability to guarantee that a business is always accessible to customers–is gaining more attention with every increase in e-commerce. A power problem or flood that knocks a business off-line for three days can be just as financially lethal as a terrorist attack, and not surprisingly, companies that are in the financial sector or that do business exclusively or primarily over the Web are all over this problem–at least intellectually.
Patricia McAnally, senior director of marketing at SunGard Availability Services, a division of Wayne, Pa.-based SunGard Data Systems Inc., cautions that businesses are not as "buttoned down" as they should be, given what is at stake for many. "Information security is a huge concern right now," McAnally says. "They have so much dependency on technology today, and security threats can interrupt that technology and their business stops."
Businesses need a "holistic" program that looks at hardware and software security together. It's not enough to have just a firewall. Companies need to establish procedures and monitoring so that when a software company issues an upgrade alert, employees respond, she suggests. "There has to be an awareness and a training," McAnally says. "Half of these viruses are spread because people open attachments."
SunGard Availability, which has more than 10,000 clients in North America and Europe, offers a range of products and services, including managed hosting and facilities it calls "hot sites," to ensure businesses have access to critical information systems. SunGard's hot sites are outfitted with personal computers, telephones and other equipment that enables companies to restart their businesses if they can't use their own offices. SunGard Availability runs more than 65 hot sites worldwide. "We have a very robust testing plan," McAnally explains. "We have more than 2,000 IT professionals that staff our facilities, and our customers come in on a regular basis as part of their contracts."
Managed hosting, meanwhile, allows companies to take "mission critical" applications and run them in SunGard Availability facilities, as well as in their own locations. Companies that use "mirroring" technology, which allows them to create on hardware an exact copy of what's on their computer system in a different location, can keep that duplicate hardware and information at a SunGard Availability site.
It's In The Vault
While mirroring is mainly sought out by big, well-funded concerns, Iron Mountain's Malis said cheaper alternatives that don't make instantaneous copies are a good bet for small and medium-sized companies with less money to spend on hardware and IT staff. "It's called electronic vaulting, and this is technology that's really come to market in the past three and a half years," Malis says.
Companies can install the vaulting software–whether it's on a personal computer or a server–and make one complete backup of their system. After that, the software backs up any changes.
Iron Mountain offers electronic vaulting. It licenses the PC software from a company called Connected Corp., based in Framingham, Mass., and the server technology from LiveVault Corp. in Marlborough, Mass., Malis explains.
Another problem a company faces when a system goes down for whatever reason is getting in touch with the necessary complement of employees to help get back online quickly. Strohl Systems Group Inc., a King of Prussia, Pa.-based concern which offers business continuity planning software and services, recognized the need and came out recently with a crisis communications product called NotiFind. The solution offers companies a way to reach employees quickly when needed, whether it's because of a downed server or a terrorist attack. The system reaches more employees much faster than manual efforts, and allows for two-way conversation. "The simplest way to put it is that it's an auto dialer," says Chris Worton, senior vice president of sales. "But it's much more than that. We have people that just use that tool for a network outage. So [if] a certain system goes down and they need to contact the people to get it back up and running, they use that to contact the people whether it's via pager or phone or an e-mail."
Worton says Strohl expects NotiFind to help his company's sales grow from 10% in 2003 to as much as 25% this year. "The first thing you want to do in any event is to make sure that you are taking care of your people," he said. "Without the people, you can't do any of these plans to get back in business."
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