Save a Days Worth of Revenue With Enhanced Recovery!
Saving the potential loss of a days revenue is a no brainer. Every hour of down time for a medium sized firm could add up to a loss of £5 million a day when employees and customers are denied access to information and trading systems.
If you find the answer for your business lies somewhere between the two figures above and your recovery time objective is based on 24-48 hours or longer, you may want to re-consider your recovery options for two good reasons.
1. Your customers won't wait two or three days to trade
Consider your own buying behaviour when shopping online. If the page doesn't appear, do you wait two days or do you buy elsewhere? According to research carried out by YouGov last year, the chances are you're like the 47% of people who won't even wait 60 seconds, so instead you and they buy from alternative suppliers.
2. An instant start to recovery is now available and affordable
For a modest incremental spend, customers who cannot justify a managed, recovery service will find they can now afford a new service from SunGard that makes a step change in their recovery time objective performance which is underpinned by a robust business case. This service is called Enhanced Recovery.
The Business Case for Enhanced Recovery
Modest Cost Versus Attractive Benefits
The argument of investing to mitigate a potential loss of £5 million a day when your systems are down is straight forward but if you think you will never make a return on your investment based on a hypothetical event - think again!
Technology failure, facilities failure, viruses, denial of access to your workplace, and health and safety issues continue to be prevail as the most likely incidents to disrupt your business rather than the large-scale incidents that make the news headlines.
You may have already invested in a two or three day recovery solution, but given the likelihood of a failure occurring and the resulting change in customer buying behaviour that follows, the benefits of improving recovery time objectives for a modest cost is compelling.
Recovery Time Objective is Reduced By 1/3
For a modest incremental spend, Enhanced Recovery automates and eliminates low value processes during recovery, such as travel time, administration, server configuration and setup time.
The result is impressive. The entire end-to-end recovery process is reduced by up to a third which means your starting point for recovery almost begins at the data restore process. On a three day recovery, the time saved mounts up to an entire business day saved.
Moreover, Enhanced Recovery benefits extend beyond the notional recovery incident - enabling firms to reduce costs associated with a planned testing programme.
Operational Budget Savings
Running a recovery function carries with it activity cost and like most overheads it comes under intense financial scrutiny annually and quarterly. By the time you reach quarters three or four, you could find your discretionary spend frozen for the rest of the year. This effectively scuppers the remainder of your test programme.
In our experience, customers can spend more than £10,000 on three, three day tests per year which include travel, hotel, overtime, subsistence and administration costs. For the IT outsourcers, this cost can run into seven figure numbers and that excludes the lost billing opportunities of staff removed from billable work to perform recovery testing.
Cost Savings Extended to Testing and Budgets Ring Fenced
Enhanced Recovery enables IT managers/directors to ring fence part of your budget by enabling you to transfer funds from discretionary spend codes to technology/CAPEX codes which are far easier to justify than overtime, hotel and travel expenditure.
Increasing Value and Productivity
The more for less business ethos continues to impact IT and recovery departments. Your core team are in constant demand to deliver projects that support the business objective, whilst also keeping the systems running. Chances are, you're delivering a better service than last year but with less heads.
Whilst focusing on your immediate and visible objectives, recovery can fall to the bottom of your priority list, meanwhile recruitment agencies are proactively trying to relieve you of your best staff, all of which frustrate your total productivity performance.
So it's not surprising that when you get around to testing, your team struggle to reach the RTO. After all recovery is not easy. In our experience, customers who test without assistance from SunGard sometimes miss their RTO.
Faster, Reliable Testing Frees up Staff Earlier Improving Productivity
Enhanced Recovery actually makes testing simpler for your team and reduces the amount of time it takes to recover a firm by about a third, which on a three day test mounts up to an entire business day. This enables you to choose from a wider range of technical staff, reducing your dependence on a few key staff members with select skills.
For the average test programme, nine man days can be saved, which means your team can quickly return from testing to help achieve your other business objectives.
Contributing to Corporate Responsibility
Whilst your firms corporate message might espouse the value of family life and striking the right balance between work and home. Top down, financial decision making and under resourcing can be counter productive. This discrepancy places enormous strains on family relationships when staff spend increasing amounts of time away from home to bridge the resourcing shortfall.
In the end something has to give. If its not the family relationship, it could be your staff deciding to leave or financially worse - stress related litigation claims.
Improved Work / Life Balance and Staff Retention
Clearly, the less time a recovery test takes, the fewer nights the recovery team need to spend away from home. The Remote Console capability of Enhanced Recovery enables your team to effect a recovery remotely from anywhere that has broadband capability. This reduces your teams need to travel and spend time away from home, making a significant contribution to delivering your firms corporate social values and a contribution to reducing carbon emissions.
How SunGard Can Help You
By engaging SunGard's professional services consultants at the start of the project we begin by fully understanding your recovery needs and objectives and then implement robust processes to eliminate potential recovery errors.
SunGard pre-configure your recovery servers with live server images so that restoration can begin instantaneously when requested to do so.
It sounds easy, but it requires a consistent, standardised, repeatable and robust methodology / administration to manage hardware & software changes, configuration, updates and patching.
SunGard deploys three key products to facilitate a recovery:
Finally, network and server performance monitoring help you measure the success of the recovery.
Contact SunGard
To find out more about SunGard's Enhanced Recovery call:
+44 (0) 800 143 143