The second week in January 2011 will be forever remembered by Queenslanders as one of the worst floods in the recorded history of the south-east corner. During this dramatic week images of the flood disaster played out through various media channels. Some of the images of the flood have become iconic in their own right including cars being tossed around as if they were a miniature and not 2 tonnes of steel and boats floating down the river still attached to their pontoons.
There are countless stories of households losing everything apart from what they could carry in their arms as the water rose rapidly around them. There are also numerous stories of businesses being forced to close as a result of water damaged stock or the loss of critical business information. As the clean-up continues there will be more horror stories of the trail of destruction left by the 2011 floods. Although the damage to physical assets is something that if often unavoidable the loss of information stored electronically in a database is certainly something that can be avoided. In the aftermath of any major catastrophe such as the 2011 floods there is always a time of reflection. Often this reflection involves the voices of hindsight and the words ‘if only if we had’.
Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. There are unfortunately many business owner, boards, managers and employees that are thinking to themselves in the aftermath – if only we had a disaster recovery plan. Over the last few days we have heard the horror stories of organisations that have been in the position were they did not have a backup or the backup did not work or simply they did not have a plan in place should the data centre become inaccessible.
In light of the tragic events in Queensland, as your organisation undertakes a Post Incident Review now is the time to think about the future and your Disaster Recovery Readiness. Considering the facts below, if your organisation suffered a disaster would your business survive if it was unable to access the data stored in your SQL Server environment.
- 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster (National Archives & Records Administration)
- 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster (The Cost of Data Loss, Harald Anderson)
- Companies that aren’t able to resume operations within ten days (of a disaster hit) are not likely to survive (Strategic Research Institute)
Now is the time to think about your Disaster Recovery Readiness.
