All small and medium enterprises typically face the same challenge: to keep costs in control so that they don’t affect profitability of the enterprise. Enterprises expect that IT investments of any kind must start reaping returns immediately which is why most of them automate and streamline their business processes.
However, along with investing in the automation of mission-critical processes it is imperative to have a Disaster Recovery strategy in place. Small and medium enterprises must invest in solution level of redundancy that will help keep them prepared in the event of a disaster and ensure that mission-critical applications recover in minimal time to help them resume critical business operations.
Most SMEs, however, fail to focus on DR primarily due to the huge investments required to set up an inhouse DR facility. Other reasons include:
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it”: Also known as the ‘Ostrich Syndrome’, most IT Managers perceive disasters as improbably events that will probably never affect them.
- Shortsightedness: Never having faced a disaster-related outage before, most SMEs fail to quantify the hourly loss they’d face in the event of critical systems going down.
- Motivation: Lack of senior management consensus, no one to push the case for a DR solution internally and therefore it is in a state of limbo.
Surprisingly, though aware about the importance of having a DR system in place, a significant number of SMEs do not want to make huge investments in setting up a DR facility.
These factors drive an SME’s decision to indefinitely postpone planning and implementing a DR solution.