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RECOVERY SENIOR
EDITOR ASSOCIATE
EDITOR COPY
EDITORS ADVERTISING _____________ Corporate President/CEO Vice
President
CONFERENCE REGISTRAR EXECUTIVE
COUNCIL
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The Industry Name Du Jour By DAMIAN WALCH In the 13 years I’ve been in this industry, the name disaster recovery (DR) has been the cornerstone. “This industry” is going by many different monikers nowadays – disaster recovery, business continuity, and contingency planning. I’ve even had a few debates whether all of this activity falls under the category of risk management. While there are definitions for all of those terms, I still find it comical that professionals find it necessary to explain what “they mean” by business continuity. The definitions have different flavors and nuances. I guess you would say that our professionals don’t completely agree on terminology and taxonomy. It seems our lack of generally accepted definitions doesn’t limit the amount of innovation going on, because I continue to see articles and presentations about “the next generation of business continuity,” “operational recovery,” not to mention “high availability replacing disaster recovery.” This nomenclature predicament shouldn’t be a problem. It doesn’t really matter if we all agree or not, right? As long as we’re carrying out the basic fundamentals:
The problem is that I’m uncomfortable with the number of companies I walk into that don’t have those things in place. These companies have been doing some level of DR, BC or contingency planning for 10 to 15 years and still don’t have much to show for it. Yes, they’ve got some binders with paper plans, some planning software, maybe they are even doing some storage mirroring. However, in the wake of an actual disaster it is those same companies that scramble to determine who talks to the media, which applications should be recovered first, or where their people will go the next business day. So I wonder, does having all these different interpretations of industry terms affect our ability to accomplish our objectives? Is our diligent deliberation about the distinctions between disaster recovery and business continuity decreasing our effectiveness? By pondering how high availability solutions overlap with traditional IT recovery solutions, are we impacting our company’s ability to implement either one? I’m starting to believe it does. Our departments and vendors brood over definitions instead of looking pragmatically at what needs to be done to improve a company’s ability to respond to disruptions, outages and crisis situations. I’d like to make a suggestion. Let’s agree on our common taxonomy. The Disaster Recovery Journal Editorial Advisory Board created a glossary which is a living document and is updated in conjuction with DRI International to set a standard for industry definitions. That glossary is the collective know-how of some of the founders and leading thinkers of this industry. Use it to your advantage and communicate those terms within your organization. Inform your team of those standards and guidelines, and use it as your taxonomy! As a consultant, I always have a twist. I want to introduce a new term. This new term is one I’ve already written, but not defined. This new term encompasses all the concepts we’ve discussed, not to mention information security and incident response. This new term is business resilience. Business resilience is the ability to manage information-based risks so you can rapidly adapt and respond to opportunities and threats while continuing business operations. Business resilience is our industry’s raison d’être – the purpose that justifies our industry’s existence. If we are able to agree to some of this common language and focus on our basic fundamentals, then one day maybe all of the companies I walk into will be able to describe themselves as “resilient.” They would be able to withstand peak demand, natural disasters, application failures, hackers and worms as a normal course of action. To illustrate my point I want to use a story familiar to some –
the Tower of Babel. I stumbled upon a representation of this Tower of
Babel and the correlation with this industry problem struck me. After
doing a quick Google search, I came upon this quote: Just think ... if we had one common language, even this notion of
resilience may be possible! ©Copyright 2005 Systems Support Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without the express written permission of System Support Inc. is prohibited.
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