How to choose a midmarket disaster recovery service provider

By James M. Connolly, Contributor | Apr 6, 2009

0 comments

Delicious

Digg

Email

Print

Your midrange company has outgrown a disaster recovery plan that relied on backup tapes stored in a systems administrator's car trunk -- now it's time to sign up a disaster recovery service provider. The challenge, though, is selecting a midmarket service provider that's right for your IT strategy and will be there when you really need them.

The first step is to look inward so you can define your needs. A self-analysis should help you identify the amount of downtime you can endure for key applications and the cost of that downtime. In turn, this will determine what types of services you require.

"Usually, the amount of money you are going to spend with a service provider is going to be based on what you potentially could lose if you are down for an hour, a day, a week or whatever," said Roberta Witty, a research vice president at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

Costs vary widely depending on what you're after: disaster recovery or business continuity. "If it's business continuity, then it involves more than backup tapes," said Bob Laliberte, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass. "That's when you start getting into some serious expense with replicating data synchronously and the high-bandwidth links that allow you to do that over greater distances. If all you are doing is tape, you have already accepted that you can afford to lose up to 24 hours of data.''

Managers in midrange companies also need to weigh whether they want "one-stop shopping,'' in which they pay disaster recovery service providers extra for features such as workspace to house employees, or data center space where they can install their own systems.

Larry Marler, disaster recovery coordinator at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Co. in Jackson, Miss., is a certified continuity professional. He said he advises managers to look at a service provider's technical strengths in terms of its ability to support a customer's core technologies, as well as its understanding of customers' business needs. "For a company the size of mine, I want to make sure we have the resources available to assist my people in a disaster. We exercise regularly, and I find that a provider's expertise is a big part of that,'' said Marler, a customer of SunGard Availability Services.

Location matters

Managers must strike a balance in terms of the proximity of a service provider's data center. If it's too close to your primary data center, it could be affected by the same storm or power outage that sends your team to the recovery data center. If the recovery site is too distant, it can be difficult to get IT staffers to the site, particularly for a smaller company with limited resources, according to Witty.