Not so long ago, federal agencies were urging small business owners to begin taking disaster recovery and continuity planning a bit more seriously, and for good reason. The numbers were decisively stacked against entrepreneurs, with studies finding that the majority of smaller firms were at risk of having to close their doors forever should a major event strike and cause a long-lasting outage of operations.
Natural disasters were the talk of the town back in the late 2000s, but it appears as though modern technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization have helped to reduce the sting of these threats. Now, man-made disasters and glitches appear to be the most dangerous risks out there, and this was evidenced by countless events that have taken place in the past few years, including the recent outage of the New York Stock Exchange.
NYSE’s bad day
Tech Republic reported that the NYSE suffered an outage of about three hours on July 8 and, while the disruption did not have much of an impact on the market, it was enough to wreak havoc in other ways. Remember, direct financial damages are never the only types of issues an organization, or market in this situation, will face when a disaster strikes, as reputational problems can quickly arise as well.
The NYSE outage was indicative of lacking intelligence in DR programs.
According to the news provider, this particular event made it clear that communication in times of challenging threats needs to be tight, but was not, leading to a longer recovery time. What’s more, the source pointed out that networks and software were pegged as being the cause of the event, but that the root issue therein would involve managers’ ability to pinpoint vulnerabilities and eradicate them in stride.
Finally, Tech Republic noted that the NYSE likely could have benefited from a more tailored, effective and clearly defined response team that could have stepped in and shortened the time to a full recovery.
Everyone needs DR
Whether it’s a small business or a massive financial exchange like the NYSE, the need for intelligent and exhaustive disaster recovery plans will always be high. Organizations that do not have the utmost confidence in their own abilities to reduce the risk of outages and disruption should always consider working with professional service providers to get their strategies in order, as tapping the support available can save firms a wealth of money, time and energy down the road.