AppCon Assists with Business Continuity Planning
By Kelly Harray, Director, ApplicationContinuity.Org
Companies across the globe inevitably face, and must plan for, technology failure, malicious human activity, and the unpredictable ravages of Mother Nature.
Companies worldwide have been wrestling with the meaning of the buzzwords business continuity for the last decade. During this decade, the Internet has changed the face of corporate communications, crystallizing the need for assured, 24 X 7 operation of businesscritical applications; bullet-proof protection of the data associated with those applications; and painfree, guaranteed access to both in the event of a local outage or a longer term disaster scenario.
Defining the Challenge
Analysts, industry experts, and editors have diligently researched and reported the facts and figures surrounding the events that interrupt business continuity. The conclusions are undeniable. On a macro level, according to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, DC, 93 percent of businesses that suffer more than 10 days of business-critical system downtime, will, within a year, file for bankruptcy. Furthermore, 40 percent of companies that experience more than 24 hours without access to their data, will go out of business, concludes the Eagle Rock Alliance Ltd in its Contingency Planning and Management Survey. The U.S. Weather Research Program reports that the average annual weather-related business losses in the United States alone tally US$15 billion. What does this tell us? Corporations must have plans to maintain their mission critical applications and protect their valuable corporate data from myriad outage events that may occur.
Developing the Plan
The first step is to understand that the impact of critical system downtime results in halted business processes and vital data loss. Organizations must develop a plan to protect key business processes and ensure the healthy continuance of a business. The obvious next steps are to determine which systems must have failsafe operational protection and what the cost is for downtime of those systems. This allows the CIO and IT staff to prepare a comprehensive analysis for the Return on Investment (ROI) of their continuity acquisitions. The research results are available for companies of all sizes. For a small, 200-person company, the downtime cost per hour is US$5,300 estimates Performance Technologies. Digital V6 Corporation research states that for a mid-market, 400-person company, the hourly system downtime cost on average is US$13,170. For large companies, the average network downtime cost per hour is an astonishing US$84,000 per hour or US$1,400 per outage minute, according to International Data Corporation.
Once IT departments identify their business critical systems, the next move is to determine the most cost-effective solutions and methods of building a sustainable operational infrastructure. Particularly in the face of inevitable local and site-wide outages and disasters. Key to this planning process is minimizing increased burden on already over-taxed IT teams, which often have insufficient human and/or equipment budgets.
Why AppCon 2007
In an attempt to aid this crucial planning process, conferences populated by all manner of high technology product and service vendors have blossomed. However, these conferences and seminars have historically addressed only a subset of the components required to meet the business continuity challenge. Typically the storage, data protection and preservation, as well as the data archiving and compliance aspects of business continuity are explored, while ignoring the obvious and critical application continuity element.
Business critical application continuity is the cornerstone of any comprehensive business continuity plan. Recoverable data is not useful without the applications to access and use that data. Recognizing this fact, ApplicationContinuity.org was established and plans for the first Application Continuity Conference were made. The annual conference is designed to provide a muchneeded forum for IT professionals, from the CIO to the network administrator, to examine and discuss the problems, options, costs, and optimal solutions across their entire application infrastructure. This year David Hall, CTO Compucom, leads the illustrious speaker roster of industry influencers, analysts, and journalists. Hall, a respected industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience in assessing, deploying, implementing, and supporting IT technologies will deliver the keynote address. The inaugural event will focus on the convergence of application and data continuity, providing CIOs and IT teams with information, research findings, ideas, and opinions on application survivability and reliability to assure successful business continuity. With face-to-face discussion opportunities, and well-orchestrated presentations, AppCon 2007 closes the huge information and solutions gap in the business continuity spectrum. Corporations everywhere need to develop and implement surefire disaster recovery and continuance plans. The collaborative format of the conference will allow attendees to discuss and address their specific corporate planning requirements for continuity and survivability in the face of IT infrastructure failures and disasters.
Showcasing the latest trends and continuity solutions, the conference will address the key issues business continuity professionals confront—installing, managing, maintaining and securing the critical applications and data that power their businesses. In addition to offering sessions with industry experts and analysts, the interactive structure of the event will feature many real-life case studies. Participants can interact face-to-face with peers, learn how to prevent outages and promote continuous application availability, and seek solutions that meet their specific needs in an extensive vendor gallery.
AppCon 2007 will take place on September 13th and 14th at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California. More information including registration details, can be found by visiting www.applicationcountinuity.org.
KH/TMP