By Kirk Drake | January 14, 2013

Top Four Outsourced Items That Improve your Disaster Recovery Plan

All businesses or Credit Unions do some form of outsourcing and I mean ALL. You may think you don't but if you look at the fact that you probably don't produce your own power or you buy telecom from another company you outsource. So if you are interested in how outsourcing several specific items can greatly improve your Disaster Recovery Program read on...

In my experience there are two schools of thought related to outsourcing or co-sourcing IT systems. From one set of clients they focus on things that are not so important to their business, or none core business functions. A good example would be deciding that you can't be the best at something and choosing to outsource. Ongoing Operations does this by having Insperity provide all of its Human Resource functions including benefits and payroll. Let's face it, no matter how good we think we are at HR - a company that has several thousand HR experts is probably better. In the outsourcing of none-core items we generally have companies or Credit Unions buy a few outsourced servers that don't do anything important. For example, a server for their CUSO or for a test environment. The other set of clients goes for the most important functions or functions that are most key to their customers or members. In this group we have clients that outsource online banking infrastructure or a critical item like e-mail or phones. Honestly - I have no way of predicting the way one organization views it from another - I have found it arbitrary and unpredictable.

Despite the two opposing perspectives - I believe there are four items that every organization should outsource as a methodology to improve their Disaster Recovery Plan. They are as follows:

Hosted E-mail

When Ongoing Operations started, E-mail was always rated one of the least important items on a BIA, Business Impact Analysis. It had low Recovery Time Objectives, RTO, and low Recovery Point Objectives, RPO, and clients always ignored it. We felt differently but sometimes you just have to let clients learn on their own. The main problem is that every single other business process probably relies on e-mail these days. I don't care if it is Accounts Payable or providing a customer a report - it probably involves e-mail in the process. These days almost all of our clients prioritize e-mail as one of the most important applications to recover. The problem comes right there - if it is so important - why do you want to spend time recovering e-mail? If you outsource it to a reliable partner - it will just be up the whole time. You wont spend time worrying about it and you immediately can focus on the customer or member facing process instead.

Hosted Phones

Almost all of our clients require phones to functions. Again the BIA will tell you how many and how important they are but for almost everyone they are key to solving problems and taking care of our clients. Because they are so important, most everyone spends lots of money on reliable phone lines (PRIs) from phone carriers and probably have bought expensive VoIP systems or call center telephony. There in lies the problem. They are expensive - and to get redundancy and eliminate the risk from phones being down - you have to buy two of everything. Then you have to test and be good at failing over the systems and making knowing how the process and technology work in depth. Making things work redundantly is exponentially more challenging and more expensive than just making one work. It is also far less forgiving when mistakes are made. Buying a hosted VoIP or Hosted Virtual PBX from a provider eliminates tons of single points of failure, is probably cheaper, and means that as long as the internet is up - you can talk to each other and customers...let's face it - when did the internet last go down?

Hosted Website

This is probably one of the things you have already outsourced. Very few companies host their own website. Usually what a hosting can provide is so far beyond what you can build on your own - why would you host it. That being said - the main reason from a Disaster Recovery Perspective to outsource this is that it will just be up. Then using your Crisis Management Plan - you can update it quickly and reliably to make sure your members and customers know what is going on.

Hosted Online Business Continuity Plan

There are a number of key advantages to hosting your Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery Plan online. To name a few it is easier to search, changes take place immediately and are available to everyone immediately and you don't have to lug a book around anymore. Click here for a full analysis of the pros and cons of an online plan.

In summary - moving all of these applications outside your environment will accomplish three things in general.

1. It will save you money 
2. It will save you time and allow you to focus on recovering your other business processes
3. It will enable you to head right to the good stuff and not have to wait at all to start functioning in an actual disaster event.

Would you like to learn more about how the risk from these items can be measured? Would you like to learn how to conduct a risk assessment?

If you have these or other questions - please fill out this quick form below and a hosting or business continuity expert will get back to you quickly.