Sidebar: Critical Success Factors for Strategic Disaster Recovery

By Lucas Mearian

April 19, 2004 12:00 PM ET

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View disaster recovery not as a tactical IT project but as a strategic IT asset. Both disaster recovery and business continuity planning are essentially event-triggered, nonstrategic insurance policies that offer no reasonable expectation of a return on investment.

Turn portions of your disaster recovery sites from a cost center into a profit center by splitting your business operations between your headquarters and the alternate data center. This eliminates the need for staff relocation and backup sites.

Integrate disaster recovery IT assets and personnel into operations budgets across geographically dispersed data centers to blur the lines between what is disaster recovery and what is operational expense. In all cases, disaster recovery must be viewed as a mission-critical expense.

Build operational efficiency objectives into your disaster recovery strategies.

Current IT wisdom dictates that IT departments use part of the capital freed up by driving down operational costs to invest in IT projects geared toward building strategic advantage. Instead, invest the resulting savings in IT resilience across critical lines of business.

Share the cost of disaster recovery with partners and fellow institutions. Disaster recovery isn't a matter of competitive differentiation or advancement, but a matter of survival. It may make sense for companies to pool their assets and personnel to provide resilience capabilities for interconnected systems or collaborative technologies such as payments or check processing.

Source: TowerGroup, Needham, Mass.

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