Disaster Recovery Journal - Summer 2001 Issue- Ask the Executive

DISASTER RECOVERY
JOURNAL

Return to the Spring 2001
Index

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PUBLISHER &
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
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SENIOR EDITOR
Janette Ballman
janette@drj.com

EDITOR
Michelle Saab
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COPY EDITORS
Edward H. Pearce, CBCP
drj@drj.com
Richard Sandhofer
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INTERNET /
ADVERTISING
Robert Arnold
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_____________

Corporate

President/CEO
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

Vice President
Robert Arnold
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CONFERENCE COORDINATOR
Patti Fitzgerald, CBCP
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CONFERENCE REGISTRAR
Merce Knese
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CIRCULATION
Laura Baugh
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INTERNATIONAL
CONTACTS
England: Thom Hetherington
Business Continuity
Phone: 0161-237-1007
thomh@tempus.demon.co.uk

Australia: Anthony J. Harvey
Journal of Business Continuity
Phone: 0011-613-953-0055-8
fax: 0011-613-953-0528
sector@notability.com.au

Japan: Shinji Hosotsubo
Quake Japan Co., Ltd.
Phone: 03-3215-2880
fax: 03-3215-2881

Brazil: Jose Carlos Ferreira
Disaster Recovery Mercosul
Phone: 55 11 3666-9506
conc2000@uol.com.br
ww.drms.com.br

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An Interview with Jim Simmons of
SunGard Business Continuity & Internet Services
On Preparing for Hurricane Season

– Interviewed by Judith Eckles

This interview is with Jim Simmons, the President and CEO of SunGard Business Continuity and Internet Services, an operating group of SunGard (SDS:NYSE). SunGard Recovery Services provides business continuity services including high-availability infrastructure/electronic vaulting services, hot-and-cold sites, recovery network services and work group recovery. SunGard eSourcing specializes in managed hosting services, high-availability Internet access and high-bandwidth networking. SunGard eSourcing also provides system management services for application and data outsourcing. SunGard Planning Solutions provides business continuity consulting services, technical consulting services, and client server and web-enabled business continuity planning software.

Eckles: First, why is it so important to be prepared?
Simmons: To put it simply, time is money. We are not only more dependent than ever on computers, but we are also increasingly dependent on the Internet. More people need more access to more information more quickly than ever before. In the past, some businesses could take as many as four days to recover without impacting the bottom line. Today, some applications can’t be down four minutes without it affecting profitability.
While the cost of downtime can be measured in the millions of dollars per hour in some industries, financial impact is only one consideration. System failures can lose hard-won customer and shareholder confidence in just a few hours. The result is lost market share and corporate value, which could take years to rebuild. In the Internet world, downtime can also tarnish the image of a company, as was the case over the past year in several high profile dot com company outages.
Having said all that, I want to add that during disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, you must first address the safety and personal needs of your employees and their families.
Preparedness for hurricanes and other disasters is more important than ever. Today, with the increased dependence on technology, even a minute of downtime can cost some companies millions of dollars. No one has to go out of business due to a hurricane.

Eckles: What should a business do when a hurricane is forecast to hit their area?
Simmons: First of all, it may already be too late. You need a plan. A business should have a disaster recovery plan already in place. If you don’t have a plan, at the very least you must back-up your mission critical data - that information that your business needs to remain in business. But don’t wait. Put a plan in place and protect your business before a problem strikes.

Eckles:What happens when a flood hits - like much of the East Coast experienced with Hurricane Floyd in 1999? How can a business prepare for something like that?
Simmons: Assuming the company has a plan in place, that’s when a company needs to send employees to a facility like one of SunGard’s 25 centers around the country. At one of our facilities, SunGard replicates a business’ office environment - providing fully equipped workstations, PCs, telephones, copiers, and fax machines - everything a company needs to run its business.
During Hurricane Floyd, SunGard had 26 companies declare disasters - and every one of them recovered successfully. Which is pretty amazing considering that 43% of all American companies never reopen after a disaster.

Eckles: What is the first thing that a business can do to prepare for disaster?
Simmons: You need to protect your data - your company’s most valuable asset. Many companies have already taken the important first step of installing a backup system offsite. Backing up your data is essential since we know that 75% of all US businesses have experienced some form of interruption due to power outages, hardware and software problems or telecommunications failures.
But you’ll need to do more to ensure the continuous operation of your business in the event of a hurricane or any other disaster. You need to do something to ensure that you can continue to access and process the information that makes your business run during the recovery phase. Offsite back-up data storage is only the first step in sound best continuity practices. Every organization has different needs when it comes to business continuity. Some companies require access to an alternate system or data center after disaster strikes so they can get back up and running in a day or two. Other organizations such as financial services firms facing competitive and regulatory pressures, need a high availability solution that can prevent them from going down at all.

Eckles: What is high availability?
Simmons: High availability is an often-used phrase in the business continuity / disaster recovery press, but it is not a simple concept. In today’s dynamic global business environment, organizations competing for market share rely on the ability to continuously access and process critical information. This growing group of companies - from a regional stock exchange to an Internet-based bookseller or auction house - needs a “net” beneath their organization to help ensure their continuous operations. For these organizations, prolonged downtime is not an option.
High availability solutions, such as electronic data storage and web server mirroring, provide a safety net by enabling rapid and, in some cases, continuous data availability. With the lowering costs of telecommunications, coupled with electronic storage solutions like SunGard MetroStorâ, high availability offerings are becoming affordable to an even larger class of companies across a wide range of industries.
We have moved from event driven recovery like disasters to engineered business continuity solutions for 100% uptime. Today we have high availability services that make business continuity seamless to the end user. One server may go down but with a carefully architected solution, applications continue to run without interruption.

Eckles: How much does downtime cost business?
Simmons: Computer system downtime can have a severe impact on many businesses very quickly. Without the ability to access and process critical information, people cannot conduct many of the critical functions that are essential to developing and selling products and services, and supporting customers. One example, Dow Jones reported in July of last year that the e-Bay disruption of 1999 resulted in between $3 - $5 million in lost revenues for the 22-hour outage. A more general statistic, but no less staggering, in 1998 DRJ reported computer downtime costs US businesses $4 billion a year, primarily through lost revenue. You can only imagine with today’s increasing Internet economy how much larger that number has grown.

Eckles: Companies are doing more and more on the Internet. How can they prevent the web site from going down?
Simmons: The Internet is fundamentally changing customers’ expectations about convenience, speed, comparability, price and service. SunGard views the Internet as a “double-edged sword,” meaning where there’s opportunity there is also risk. We have seen companies establish critical production dependencies based on the Internet without understanding its inherent risks and reliability. The highly publicized dot com company outages of 1999, show the severe cost a web outage can have in terms of revenue, company value and customer confidence. Yet despite the clear risk of business loss, industry analysts such as Gartner Group say many companies, in their eagerness to launch their web-based businesses, have yet to implement adequate business continuity plans.
Business continuity planning should occur very early in the planning cycle for Internet and e-Commerce ventures. Look for a service provider who can develop a customized solution to fit your needs and can support you with extensive business continuity experience, network infrastructure, hardened facilities, web hosting and co-location. And of course I invite you to call us at SunGard, I think we are the best at what we do.

Judith Eckles, Director of Marketing Communications for SunGard Business Continuity and Internet Servcies, was a founding member of the DRJ Editorial Advisory Board and continues to be an active member of the Board.