Thoughts on Business Continuity from StorageCraft
Words are funny things. We like to think they’re solid, immutable, set in the proverbial stone. But really, they’re more like chameleons. We toss them around, use them, and they soak up new meaning with each new use, changing themselves to match the scene.
A few years ago, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle, made a comment to this effect about a popular IT buzzword:
“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements….Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”
The same thing seems to be happening to “business continuity.” The phrase is everywhere these days. Everywhere you go, you hear about it, about why you need it. More and more, however, as people adopt the term for their own purposes, its meaning gets muddled. Somewhere along the way, business continuity became just another way of saying backup and disaster recovery.
You can see an example of this in the October 2011 issue of Channel Pro. In an article specifically designed to highlight the difference between the two topics (it’s even called “Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity”), the author says this:
“Backup gets your data back after a mistake, such as deleting the wrong files. Disaster recovery gets your data back after a small disaster, such as a server hard disk crash or the wholesale theft of your servers. Business continuity gets your business back after a big disaster, such as a fire, tornado, or hurricane that destroys not only your data, but also your workplace.”
In other words, the only difference between backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity is the severity of the disaster. The article quotes a number of industry thinkers who support this view, suggesting that to many people, disaster recovery and business continuity are essentially synonyms.
Is there anything wrong with that? Well, yes and no. Obviously, words shift meaning to meet our collective, cultural needs, so the change may reflect the growing necessity of our data and IT infrastructure in the uninterrupted operation of our businesses.
But at the same time, the melding of the two ideas can distort expectations. With the cloud, the caginess of meaning came from a collective uncertainty about a new technology. Disaster recovery and business continuity, however, are both established terms and ideas and their flattening into one big disaster recovery family has flooded the market with solution providers who claim to be offering business continuity, but who are really only offering backup and disaster recovery.
To confuse matters even more, when we talk about business continuity today we’re almost always talking about IT business continuity.
True business continuity is an expansive process that covers everything from fire drills and procedures to making sure somebody always knows where the keys are to data protection, personnel calling trees, and disaster recovery plans. In a true business continuity plan, IT considerations are one piece of a larger whole.
So what is IT business continuity?
Let’s start by looking at what it isn’t. It’s not backup or disaster recovery, at least not entirely.
Backup is simply the act of securing data both locally and remotely. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, is the restoration of that data in the event of any kind of disaster, large and small. They go hand in hand, like buying a gift card and then redeeming it when the circumstances are right.
Backup and disaster recovery are more or less events that occur at specific (though sometimes recurring) times. Business continuity, on the other hand, is a process. It’s that combination of best practices, procedures, and mindsets that keeps your business running no matter what happens. It involves tasks, like backup and disaster recovery, but it is really the synthesis of these tasks, procedures, and so on. You could say that backup and disaster recovery are things you do. Business continuity is more about who you are, about how you think about your business.
Of course, backup and DR are essential elements of good business continuity, especially in this day and age where data and applications are becoming more and more crucial to business operation and survival, but business continuity is more about taking those elements and applying them in a holistic way.
So what are you offering? Disaster recovery or business continuity? Are they the same in your business model or are they different? Our new white paper, “Three Sources of Untapped Business Continuity Revenue,” talks more about how to turn disaster recovery into business continuity, but we want to know what you think. Let us know in the comments how your disaster recovery offerings are evolving to support real business continuity.
Words are funny things. They shift and change, merge and fade. Backup. Disaster recovery. Business continuity. What do you mean when you use those words? By thinking about how you talk about your services and products, you can stay ahead of the inevitable lexical evolution and make sure your offerings really do what you say they do.