Whether you’re working in Business Continuity, Operational Resilience (OpRes), Crisis Management, or directly in Disaster Recovery, you’ve experienced first hand the growth in IT disruption risk.
The increase has been precipitous.
Over the last 12 months, IT outages represented the single largest cause of disruption, according to the BCI Horizon Scan 2024.
The increasing cost of IT outages
The financial implications of these outages, factoring in loss of productivity and customer loyalty, have been stark, as well. The median cost of outages with high business impact was $7.75 million, according to a New Relic Observability Forecast report.
Digging deeper, more than three in five technologists surveyed said outages cost their organizations at least $100,000 per hour. One third said their hourly costs ran up to $500,000. Meanwhile, one in five companies endured a whopping $1 million in hourly costs due to an outage.
Existing measures to manage IT assets might not be enough
To avoid losing these staggering sums, teams have taken mighty steps to shore up vulnerabilities, improving management of critical IT assets and developing best-practice disaster recovery (DR) plans in the process.
Such is the level of risk posed, though, that these measures don’t always suffice.
After all, critical IT assets don’t exist in a silo separated from business priorities. For instance, you might classify an IT system as critical, first in line for recovery in the process of disaster recovery planning. But without layering on the appropriate cycles of business impact analysis, business continuity planning, and dependency mapping, you might only catch the criticality of the dependencies that that system relies upon once it’s too late.
Reasons to integrate disaster recovery with business priorities
Now, more than ever, ensuring that recovery from IT disruption is efficient requires alignment of IT assets with business processes up and down the dependency chain.
But what does alignment entail? It looks like this:
- The organization understands what business services and activities rely on critical IT assets.
- The organization understands if the recovery times of IT assets align with business needs.
- The organization manages DR plans in a central location, available when a disruption strikes.
The benefits are immense. Such an integrated approach allows for a more comprehensive assessment of the risks that effect key business areas. And by understanding these risks, the business is better positioned to develop more tailored DR plans that directly address the unique vulnerabilities of each business unit.
Beyond minimizing potential downtime and avoiding significant financial loss, closely tying disaster recovery to business priorities also leads to more efficient resource allocation. Resilience-enhancing investments can be focused on the most critical systems and processes that directly impact the business, resulting in better budget management and improved ROI.
How to manage critical IT assets and DR plans in a central location
But where to turn if you want to manage critical IT assets and DR plans in a central location?
Well, Noggin’s Disaster Recovery functionality helps organizations align critical IT assets with business operations. The Module, integrated with Noggin’s Business Continuity, Operational Resilience, and Crisis Management solutions, facilitates a rapid, coordinated response from all stakeholders.
Here’s what you get:
Centralized disaster recovery
Noggin provides an integrated workspace that helps organizations establish a unified disaster recovery strategy template enabling them to define recovery plans, formulate response strategies, assign roles and responsibilities, and utilize pre-assigned checklists.
IT alignment with business needs
Noggin simplifies disaster recovery by mapping critical IT assets directly to essential business functions, offering a comprehensive view of operational dependencies. This clear visualization helps organizations quickly identify and prioritize recovery efforts.
Simplified testing and continuous improvement
Noggin allows organizations to easily test and update their disaster recovery plans, ensuring they stay relevant to changing business needs and IT environments. Teams can simulate various disaster scenarios without disrupting operations, helping to identify weaknesses and make timely adjustments.
Streamlined IT disaster recovery with automation
Noggin streamlines IT disaster recovery by enabling the rapid activation of pre-defined recovery plans and automated team notifications, all while managing incidents within a dedicated workspace. This allows organizations to respond swiftly to disruptions, ensuring seamless coordination, minimizing downtime, and reducing the overall impact on business operations.
Visual relationship mapping
Leverage Noggin’s interactive relationship map to visualize key connections between IT assets, services, and activities. Easily pinpoint interconnected vulnerabilities enabling you to proactively address risks before they escalate into larger issues.
Disaster recovery plans
Centralize the creation and management of your IT DR plans in a unified workspace. Define roles and responsibilities and set up pre-assigned action checklists to ensure operational readiness. Plans can be automatically activated when incidents impact your IT assets.
What-if? Scenarios
Use what-if? Scenarios to explore hypothetical disruptions, such as system failures, and simulate their impact across your business functions and processes. Visualizing these scenarios helps you uncover hidden vulnerabilities and proactively refine your DR plans.
Exercise management
Don’t wait for an actual IT disaster to test your recovery plans. With Noggin’s exercise management, you can simulate disruptions to your IT environment to ensure your team is fully prepared to respond. This approach allows you to confidently assess and refine your recovery strategies.
Incident management
Manage all IT incidents and disruptions in one centralized workspace, automate notifications, activate response teams and recovery plans with ease. Track decisions, monitor developments, and keep key stakeholders informed with real-time updates.
Analytics and reporting
Analyze trends and create dashboards to visualize key metrics for your organization. Generate custom reports in PDF or Word formats, and share them with stakeholders to enhance data visibility, accountability, and insights for continuous improvement.
Bringing everything together
Finally, IT disruptions are on the rise, with severe outages bringing business operations to a complete stop. The only way to recover efficiently from disruption, minimizing downtime and impact to your organization, is to manage critical IT assets and disaster recovery plans in the same place.
Where, exactly? That central location should be Noggin. Noggin’s Disaster Recovery functionality helps organizations align critical IT assets with business operations, ensuring proactive management and swift execution of plans.
Don’t just take our word for it, though. See for yourself how Noggin’s integrated and automated workspace facilitates a rapid and coordinated response from all your stakeholders - request a product demo today!
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)