According to Gartner, the increased number of common
business interruptions has amplified the external disaster recovery services;
including data center, backup and mobile recovery services. The monetary value
given to this business is $3-$4 billion a year.
Stacy Collett in her article “Five Steps to Evaluating
Business Continuity Services” provided the guideline below in evaluating the
business continuity services:
- Weigh the benefits of specialized business continuity planning software.
- Consider the major business continuity/availability service providers and some niche players.
- Let recovery requirements dictate the level of dedicated BC services.
- Don’t forget emergency notification systems.
- Use caution when outsourcing business continuity functions overseas.
The article in general holds the idea that although the
do-it-yourself approach to business continuity has its advantages, it is not right
for everyone.
With the growth of cloud computing at present, organizations
can look into moving their applications and data into the Internet cloud. Outsourcing
to cloud computing services providers can be relatively inexpensive as the
hardware and operational costs are borne by the service providers. However, we
should consider that when we choose a cloud computing service provider, they
have good contingency plans too.
Insurance is a method to outsource the contingency in order
to recover the cost of equipment in the case that the equipment is damaged due
to natural disaster, accident, terrorist attack, etc.
BCPs that use cold, warm or hot sites can subscribe to the
vendors that provide such services. An example is where after the 9/11 attack,
disaster recovery vendors provide services on restoring systems and temporary
office space with telephony system and Internet access.
A common example is the web-hosting service where an
organization can choose to run its website by outsourcing it to a hosting
service. Whilst, there are many factors to consider when building an in-house
server to run the web application (i.e cost of server, operating system, web
server software, anti-virus, anti-spam, HIPS, IDS, IPS, etc) and cost the
organization a bomb, outsourcing to a service provider will not only take care
of the web-hosting, but also most of the contingency measures that otherwise
have to be done in-house.
