Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event. "Business continuity planning" suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can keep making money, not only after a natural calamity but also in the event of smaller disruptions including illness or departure of key staff members, supply chain partner problems or other challenges that businesses face from time-to-time. MDS can be the added assurance needed to keep a company making money.

1. Inadequate planning: Have you identified all critical systems, and do you have detailed plans to recover them to the current day? (Everybody thinks they know what they have on their networks, but most people don't really know how many servers they have, or how they're configured, or what applications reside on them-what services were running, what version of software or operating systems they were using. Asset management tools claim to do the trick here, but they often fail to capture important details about software revisions and so on.

2. Failure to bring the business into the planning and testing of your recovery efforts.

3. Failure to gain support from senior-level managers. The largest problems here are:
a. Not demonstrating the level of effort required for full recovery.
b. Not conducting a business impact analysis and addressing all gaps in your recovery model.
c. Not building adequate recovery plans that outline your recovery time objective, critical systems and applications, vital documents needed by the business, and business functions by building plans for operational activities to be continued after a disaster.
d. Not having proper funding that will allow for a minimum of semiannual testing.

MDS will help address the need for disaster recovery through analysis and documentation of the potential financial losses. We will work with a customer’s legal and financial departments to document the total losses per day that your company would face if you were not capable of quick recovery. By thoroughly reviewing your business continuance and disaster recovery plans, we can identify the gaps that may lead to a successful recovery.

Remember, disaster recovery and business continuance are nothing more than risk avoidance. MDS helps customers understand more clearly and can demonstrate how much risk they are taking.