[Stevieboy_uk]

Bit of a really sad question coming up to all you IT guys.

Just recently I have been asked by the MD to look at ways to reduce departmental costs (as I would imagine most others are getting at the moment). One of the contracts that will be coming up for renewal in the next few months is our Disaster Recovery contract.

We pay just under £6K per year for our DR contract (we have had this in place for many years) and just wondered what others do out there. I do not like to think that we could just “wing it” but what kind of, if any, Disaster Recovery plan do you have in place?

Regards

Steve

[Iccz]

Depends on how mission critical your data systems are.
If you'd be able to access the mission critical data in such events.
How you'd be able to cope during and after a disaster.
What the aftermath of a disaster would be if you don't have DR in place.
Is there any legal implication of not having one.

I think your MD wants to be able to say he's done everything to ensure the success and safety of the company, which is fair enough.
But you have to be able to justify DR because as you say, it's quite a cost!

There are DR courses and certifications, you could get someone trained up and get it all sorted in-house isntead of contracting it out which would reduce costs, you could look around other companies offering the service and compare costs and what they give.

Here we do not require any kind of DR, but any mission critical data we have is kept in multiple locations, does all we need to do and covers our backs to a degree.

[JagoPlasma]

what disaster are you looking at?

terrorist bomb?
building falling down?
floods?
hackers?
data corruption?

[Squiffy]

DR always looks a waste of money, until you have to invoke it.

Definitely look at your options as to how else you could have a DR capability, but it would be a brave company that would go with no DR to save money.

[Uridium]

Hell yes.

It's a few days out of the office testing the plan a couple of times a year on expenses

[Iccz]

Originally Posted by JagoPlasma

what disaster are you looking at?

terrorist bomb?
building falling down?
floods?
hackers?
data corruption?

You'd hope they're all classed as disasters!
A disaster for any company with mission critical data is the inaccessibility/loss/theft to that data, so all of them can come to it.

[JagoPlasma]

Originally Posted by Iccz

You'd hope they're all classed as disasters!
A disaster for any company with mission critical data is the inaccessibility/loss/theft to that data, so all of them can come to it.

yes but does the current company do the same thing?

other examples are

wrong hair dye product
accident involving contaminated food.

if he wants answers we need to know what disasters he wants to cover. could it be a simple power loss?

[beaverme]

What are you getting for your £6k? Disaster recovery can mean any number of things.

You'd be crazy not to have business continuity / disaster recovery plans for the business, but you don't necessarily need a third party.

[NewMan]

Originally Posted by Squiffy

DR always looks a waste of money, until you have to invoke it.

Never a truer word spoken!!!

I've been in situations where "consultants" have suggested cancelling a third-party hardware maintenance contract for our HP Unix servers, and the company was seriously considering it - until one of the disks failed and that company "saved their bacon" since the server that failed was integral to the business functioning on a day-to-day basis. Needless to say the "consultant" was given a very stern talking to, and told to find other areas to cut costs....




... so the ******* made my department redundant!

[JagoPlasma]

Originally Posted by NewMan

Never a truer word spoken!!!

I've been in situations where "consultants" have suggested cancelling a third-party hardware maintenance contract for our HP Unix servers, and the company was seriously considering it - until one of the disks failed and that company "saved their bacon" since the server that failed was integral to the business functioning on a day-to-day basis. Needless to say the "consultant" was given a very stern talking to, and told to find other areas to cut costs....




... so the ******* made my department redundant!

amazing the ignorance. they proved the consultant wrong yet still asked for their advice elsewhere? I think the place deserves to go bankrupt!

id love to be a consultant, its like a license to print money and no responsibility. all you have to do is say i "think" this is your best option now wheres my money? the when the **** hits the fan all you say is you asked my oppinion and i gave it

[Iccz]

Originally Posted by JagoPlasma

amazing the ignorance. they proved the consultant wrong yet still asked for their advice elsewhere? I think the place deserves to go bankrupt!

id love to be a consultant, its like a license to print money and no responsibility. all you have to do is say i "think" this is your best option now wheres my money? the when the **** hits the fan all you say is you asked my oppinion and i gave it

But when you're giving a professional opinion it's a different matter...

[NewMan]

Originally Posted by JagoPlasma

amazing the ignorance. they proved the consultant wrong yet still asked for their advice elsewhere? I think the place deserves to go bankrupt!

I don't mean to drag the topic off track but...

Once we were gone, the Cowboy (Indian, technically) outsourcing company demanded £3.6m over 5 years to provide support for all the systems we maintained. Our department only cost the company around £150,000 a year -less considering that most of us liked to use our own equipment, so that money was mainly salaries for 4 people - so explain to me how that's "cost cutting". Of course, the company told the Indian lot to sling their hooks, leaving them totally exposed, and, in their words "unable to reverse the redundancy decision". A company that deserves to go bankrupt, most definitely!
Wish I could name and shame the "consultant" so it appears in a google search... The guy truly was retarded.

[Stevieboy_uk]

Thanks for the opinions guys.

I do agree that DR is a necessary evil (like any other insurance policy) and am also aware of the statistics with regards to companies folding if a disaster ever strikes.

The £6K gives us redundant hardware (4 Servers, quite beefy ones) and 15 "bums" on seats in the local DR suite. 13 weeks invocation and a couple of test days per year.

The DR Contract is more for the usual type of disaster situation (fire, flood etc) so nothing out of the ordinary.

[Squiffy]

Originally Posted by Stevieboy_uk

The £6K gives us redundant hardware (4 Servers, quite beefy ones) and 15 "bums" on seats in the local DR suite. 13 weeks invocation and a couple of test days per year.

Doesn't sound too bad to me at £6k. But always worth doing a test of the market to see if any other providers can provide the same for less.

[Strobe]

May seem a dumb-ass question but has the Company actually done their own Disaster Recovery Plan; ie. not just employing a Firm to provide back-up hardware and hot-site facility, but looking at the whole shebang? Might be worth having a word with your general Insurers as they often provide programmes to do this for free? It's in their best interest obviously to get you back up and running as swiftly as possible to mitigate any potential business interruption claims.

And to your original question ... yes ... definitely!!

[Orson]

Depends on your site and the nature of your business. What would a day of non-production (or whatever) cost in real terms? i.e. overtime payments to catch up if possible?

At my previous employer, I cancelled ours (it was a similar amount, but about 10 yrs ago), but only because we had 2 separate buildings on the same estate, which I linked by fibre.
So we duplicated some hardware, and sent the data across overnight. Although we didn't have hot swap, or fail-over, if a problem occurred with any of the servers, we were confident we would be back up and running within 2 hours max, which was enough.
If we had a major disaster, & the building was uninhabitable, we had an arrangement with our hardware maintenance company that we could get across to them & use some of their space as temporary offices, payable if we used it, which we never did. But we tested it

But this was for a company that had 60ish PC users, of which we classified about 15 business critical, and 15 essential (who knows what the others did ), which required 15 PC's, running 2 shifts, which could be set up fairly quickly, within a 24 hour time frame.

Over a period of time, it saved many thousands.

If ever we had a disaster that wiped out both buildings, the need to have a working computer system would be less urgent!

[DVD-Man]

DR is only as good as your last back up.

For places that rely heavily on computer use a DR can be a massive thing, building profiles and restoring data can take some time, seen it being 2 days at one point so you need safe guards in place to cover this.

Have a good backup strategy in place and it seems the contract holds good staffing and action to get it all back up and running quickly so it's a necessary evil, if you go a year and you don't have one you feel cheated but when it goes down you'll know about it!

It's very dependant on what the users do and what kind of data is held and are people willing to lose it.

Liam

[baldrick]

I don't know the size of your company but I can't believe 6K/year is going to make or break you!?!? I'd keep the DR and look for proper inefficiencies within the business.

[Steve.J.Davies]

DR costs break point is absolutely quantifiable and justifiable.

Finding 'where the curves cross' can be a bit of an exercise for a large organisation but do able quite quickly if the right level of business people are used (i.e. NOT line managers or department heads - go higher)
6K a year is peanuts so finding where your 'curves cross' should be very easy - keep paying it but make sure the DR plan actually works, a surprising number don't. If you want to really test it bring in an outside person/people to run the test without reference to the people from the people who normally run the test. Just send the usual main company bod to the test location and lock him/her in a room with a TV, DVDs some books etc. feed him/her pizza when needed but no communication with them unless and until the plan breaks. then they are used to fix/resolve that one point and then put back in the jail room.

The plan is supposed to work if the usual bods are dead/unable to attend/in quarantine/whatever. If it doesn't then its not good enough.

If the boss is prepared to put the business at risk for the sake of 6k suggest he just runs a cheaper car

[Stevieboy_uk]

Again thanks for the comments. The MD has not suggested we get rid of DR, we need to be sure that we are getting value for money. As we are a relatively small business who supply to the automotive industry and don’t have the same bottomless pit of money some IT departments who work for the larger corporations, public sector or banking (sorry, not sure if I spelt the last word correctly ) industry have.

The £6K have some have rightly pointed out is not a huge amount of money but added to other contracts we will be renewing over the coming months add up to quite a substantial amount.

Orson, I was in a similar situation at the last company I worked for that we had the luxury of two sites, relatively close to each other so we could pretty much take care of our own DR.

Thanks again for the comments.

[Steve.J.Davies]

"Orson, I was in a similar situation at the last company I worked for that we had the luxury of two sites, relatively close to each other so we could pretty much take care of our own DR."

How close ? sometimes that can break DR.

No IT depts have bottomless budgets (HMG's apart of course).

cutting costs never easy, beware the risks of each idea. baby and bathwater...