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Katrina, 9/11, rising oil prices or a computer virus have caused IT managers to gulp and wonder if their data, hardware and software - critical to their operations - will be impacted and how.

According to research by Information Age, most IT executives believe the greatest threats to the continuity of their IT operations are:

• Internal system failure - 65 percent
• Viruses - 45 percent
• Natural disasters - 32 percent
• Power and communications outages - 33 percent

As businesses increase their reliance on information technology, the integrity of business-critical data is important.

Authors Cummings, Haag and McCubbrey believe that some companies spend up to 25 percent of their budget on disaster recovery plans; however, this is to avoid even bigger losses. Of companies that had a major loss of computerized records, 43 percent never reopen, 51 percent close within two years, and only 6 percent survive long term.

According to Contingency Planning Research, the cost per minute of downtime could mean:

• $108,000 in lost brokerage operations
• $43,000 in lost credit card operations
• $1500 in lost airline reservation operations
• $1200 in lost telephone ticket sales operations

Best laid plans
The staple to fending off disaster recovery issues is the plan. A company’s plan should be THE strategy for improving overall availability. There is no such thing as a "best" plan because there are many factors that play a role in how an organization’s plan is developed.

Major items to consider when implementing a disaster recovery plan include data availability, data integrity, and recovery time.

A Gartner survey conducted at the organization’s 2004 Data Center Conference discovered these primary disaster recovery strategies for respondent most-critical applications:

• Outsourced disaster recovery - 36 percent
• Standby disaster recovery - 23 percent
• Production load sharing - 21 percent
• Development/test resources - 18 percent
• Don’t know - 3 percent

Companies should adopt tools that complement the plan. As an example, organizations can use tools to simulate disaster scenarios and experiment with models to develop disaster recovery capacity requirements that will meet business continuance objectives within budget parameters.

To ensure data consistency and influence a speedy recovery, Gartner recommends that companies fully understand how their chosen replication technology works, its limitations and how it will react in various disaster scenarios.