Legal Commentary

IT infrastructure - think disaster prevention, not disaster recovery

By David Canton

That’s the title of my weekly Slaw post.

It is reproduced here:

That was the message delivered last night by Steve Spencer of Digital Fortress Corporation at the monthly Internetwork meeting.

He makes a good point. Many people think about disaster recovery when dealing with business continuity plans. That is the wrong focus, as recovering from a disaster has a huge cost in terms of lost customer service, idle staff time, and and hits to productivity and customer relations.

When it comes to IT infrastructure - ie the servers and systems that run a business - the better approach is to think about disaster prevention. In other words, consider the possible things that might go wrong, and take steps to prevent them from happening in the first place. That might include things like redundant hardware, auxillary power supplies, redundant internet connections, and ways to monitor all that to ensure that corrective action can be taken automatically or quickly.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on October 08, 2008 (boomark / email).