Ann All spoke with Bob Williamson, vice president of products for SteelEye Technology, a provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery on Linux and Windows. The company recently surveyed global businesses for its 2006 SteelEye Technology Business Continuity Index.

All: Were there any facts that emerged from your survey that made you especially optimistic about companies' disaster preparedness and continuity planning?
Williamson: This research clearly demonstrates that a good business continuity plan is by no stretch reserved for organizations with huge budgets. When you consider how many organizations actually use their BC plan, and that any company without one could be just a day or two from a "fatal issue," the real costs for business continuity assurance begin to look miniscule. We were encouraged to find that not only did 73 percent of organizations have formalized BC plans in place, but also that 87 percent of those plans include a remote disaster recovery site as a failover option. Clearly, real-time protection of data is a priority.

We also found that organizations are prioritizing the protection of customer-centric IT services in their plans to assure BC. Survey respondents ranked customer support as the top service to protect, with e-mail and phone systems also ranking among the top four. A lot of people might have guessed that the primary focus among IT services companies would be order processing or the like — the assumption being that the only thing businesses really care about is the cash register. But our survey results show that this is not the case at all; the talk about focusing on the customer is in fact being carried out as part of operational planning. IT leaders are obviously demonstrating alignment with the business goal of customer-centricity.

All: Conversely, were there any particular causes for concern and/or areas in which companies need to do better?
Williamson: A surprising 19 percent of organizations have no plan whatsoever for assuring business continuity, with these enterprises most often blaming cost as the key barrier. But the survey also showed that the biggest slice of organizations (40 percent) spends less than $100,000 per year on their BC initiatives. This suggests that organizations who look at cost as a primary barrier to developing a BC plan should revisit the actual costs in relation to their business risk. It is SteelEye’s experience that when actual risks are analyzed and dollar values are attached to these risks, companies find it very simple to cost justify the implementation of a BC plan.

All: Do companies seem to have the idea that business continuity is expensive? Can you recommend some BC strategies that do not cost a lot but will help ensure a business remains up and running in the event of a disaster?
Williamson: Real-time replication of business-critical data to an off-site location can be accomplished at a very reasonable rate. This allows customers to quickly gain access to their business data in the event of some catastrophe occurring. The cost to implement such a solution can be less than $5,000 per month, depending on the amount of data being replicated and the quality of service required.