I never really had any concerns about losing our company data in a disaster.

This is a phrase I often find myself repeating, however not many people understand it fully.

I’d always been relatively content that we had three types of backup. Tape backups were taken off site each night, we had an onsite SAN and we also backed up into the cloud.

I always knew that, like most companies, if we lost our data we’d lose our business, so backups were imperative.

As a business we’d always taken Business Interruption Insurance as well, like I said we’ve always taken it seriously.

A few years ago, whilst doing our annual review of our Disaster Recovery Plan (which mainly consists of patting ourselves on the back for having lots of paperwork that tells us what we will do following a disaster) one of our engineers questioned the strength of our plan.

You know the type of engineer, lives in a dream world where money is no object. Always wanting the best kit with the best redundancy and kit renewing every 3 minutes. No concept of a business not wanting to spend money on boring stuff like DR when there are fun things like Christmas parties and nights out that the money can be spent on.

He pointed out to me that although we had enough backups to fill a small data centre they weren’t much good without kit to restore them to. I had the answer to that. We can get new servers delivered the next day. His answer was instant. “How long is it going to take to rebuild the servers? How long is it going to take to restore the backups once the servers are rebuilt? What if the backups had been infected with Cryptolocker?”

Ok then Mr. Smart-arse techie what should we be doing? I was sat there pleased with myself because we had 3 types of back up, we were and still are fully insured for loss and had enough disaster recovery paperwork and policies to fill a filling cabinet.

He asked me a very simple question that I really couldn’t answer. “How much is the data worth to you?”

I thought about this for quite a few days. How much is it worth. Or how much is it worth paying to ensure we never lose the data. I still didn’t know the answer. £60, £600, £6,000, £60,000? In truth if the question was ‘how much would you be willing to pay to get your lost data back and quickly’, the answer would be easy. But, that wasn’t the question. The question was how much would you be willing to pay to prevent this situation from POSSIBLY occurring.

Two very different questions.

He didn’t care what my answer was really, he just wanted me to think seriously about our situation, and it worked.

We now have a full DR solution in place. We can spin it up to work either on premise or in the cloud if we lose our building or hardware. It also protects our backups from getting Cryptolocker and other such nasties. Importantly the FD is happy because it doesn’t cost the earth, we probably spend more on stationery, tea, coffee and paper in the year.