There is so much focus on the enterprise when it comes to DR solutions and services - but what about the SME? Vendors and service providers tend to emphasize grand plans - and significant investment - but how often does this translate into reality?

How many businesses in the Gulf region actually implement their advice? For the SME, what is the very least a business should be doing to protect itself? And how are vendors providing simple, cost-effective ways to give adequate protection and encourage them to take the issue seriously?

This article aims to give practical advice on best practices from Sachin Bhardwaj-Head of Business Development, Product Managment and Marketing at eHosting Datafort in which he will explain how organizations in the region are starting to address the issue of Disaster Recovery in a more proactive way.

1. In what industries are DR solutions most implemented among your customers?

A lot of our customers from our existing portfolio who have implemented disaster recovery solutions come from mainly the banking and finance, and service sectors including travel, hospitality, airlines, trading and even IT. These customers in the mentioned sectors host their disaster recovery site with eHosting DataFort.
Banking and financial institutions for instance, are under pressure to comply with global standards and regulations.

This is why having a comprehensive DR plan in place is mandatory. Should a site experience any major disruption, a disaster recovery solution will allow for the site to be seamlessly transferred to another site without any disruptions to daily business operations.

For disaster recovery solutions, organizations need to devise a strategy on how business objectives can be achieved, what methods and procedures need to be taken should a disaster strike and what documents are required in the process and what kind of a solution are they looking at i.e. Software DR Solution (replication etc.), Hardware DR Solution (SAN to SAN).

2. What about size of businesses?

It really all depends. On-going trends in the region suggest that disaster recovery has been a solution implemented mostly across the finance and services sector.

However, following the global economic downturn along with a number of recent regional devastations, organizations other than those in the banking and finance and service sectors are more ready to take on proactive planning than ever before. A Business Continuity Planning survey conducted in the last quarter of 2009 is a testimony to the recent interest in business crisis planning as it was revealed that companies in the region are concerned with business disruptions including failure of computer hardware/software and data loss as being perceived as the highest risk. 21 per cent of the region’s business executives also stated that natural disasters such as storms, flood and earthquakes were of particular concern.

There is however, still a way to go. The survey however, revealed that nearly 70 per cent of the region’s businesses lack robust business continuity planning and this is a great area of concern that needs to be addressed.

Without concrete business crisis planning in place, companies risk the possibility of major business losses as experienced with recent incidents including the power outage in one of the Emirates and the more tragic, Cyclone Gonu in Oman. Companies suffered multi-billion dollar losses and lost market share to the point of closure of business.

3. What are the constraints that SMEs may face when wanting to implement DR solutions?

Generally speaking, smaller companies’ key constraint is the cost factor. In spite of growing awareness of major disruptions and disasters caused to businesses in the region, companies are still not able to fully realize the consequences of a potential disaster.

While these threats are considered too remote or too unlikely to happen for it to be taken into account, business crisis planning such as the implementation of disaster recovery solutions is not on top of SMEs’ agenda.

Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Planning allows an organization to identify the threats/vulnerabilities and quantify the potential critical data loss. In assessing a cost versus threats analysis, companies are able to visualize the potential loss and act accordingly should a disaster occur.

4. And how are vendors helping SMEs to overcome these constraints through providing simple, cost-effective solutions?

Managed service providers like eHosting DataFort can carry out business continuity planning solutions based on an organization’s cost requirements. It’s all about analyzing the customer’s needs and prioritizing what aspects of their business is most critical and must be available at all times. We provide all elements of DR including a comprehensive DR solution for data and server protection, a DR Site, connectivity between DR Sites and DR Seats for customers requiring a working space should their site become inaccessible.

We are currently conducting a free ‘Health Check’ which is a free one day audit of the customer’s Data Centre. This includes conducting a personalized site visit of customer’s Data Centres and analyzing the existing tier levels, service level agreements, gap analysis of Data Centre resilience and looking at areas of improvement (capacity, availability, reliability and security). This is to be followed by conducting a brief workshop with regard to uptime/availability and evaluation of data collected and handover of findings and report to the customer.

5. How are vendors creating more awareness on the need for DR in this region?

eHosting DataFort aggressively activated a set of marketing and PR activities in 2009 to increase awareness of their brand and their services in Disaster Recovery. Through participating in a number of tech industry events and forums, inviting media to round table sessions, offering free “DR health checks“ to companies in the region, eHosting DataFort has generated more understanding of their business to both tech and non-technical (business) audiences.

To give an example: In the last quarter of 2009, eHDF launched a Business Continuity Management survey with the aim of highlighting the potential threats to an organization should disaster strike. Case studies of actual devastations to businesses following a number of disasters that happened in the region were also examined.

The survey generated press coverage in local newspapers, business magazines, TV and radio interest. The survey has since then generated a number of business leads and positioned eHDF as the region’s leading managed IT services provider offering disaster recovery solutions.

6. Can you provide some case study examples where your customers are starting to address the need for more pro-active DR?

We are running DR Sites for a few customers but cannot disclose too much information considering confidentiality agreements. However, we are seeing a lot of traction from several industries where availability of data is critical for the company to operate its business successfully and downtime is not permissible whether of the applications, IT infrastructure or of the Data Centre itself.