The November 13 Wikibon Peer Incite Research Meeting provided a fascinating glimpse of a small company struggling with data growth. Like many firms, Poulin Grain is fed up with the perpetual cycle of running out of capacity and forced capital expenditures.
What made the call most interesting is Poulin's IT Manager, Paul Martin isn't simply looking to the cloud to stem data growth and address his DR challenges, he's looking to Amazon's Glacier. While he hasn't made a final decision, Glacier clearly is a top contender due to it's attractive costs and simplicity. At a penny per gigabyte per month and a Get/Put object store syntax, Glacier is alluring to firms like Martin.
Many in the Wikibon community have warned CIOs about Glacier. It is the "mother of caveat emptor." As the saying goes, backup is one thing, recovery is everything, and Glacier's strength is its cost attractiveness, not its accessibility. Martin is well aware of the risks. He's thought them through and still keeps coming back to Glacier. Simply put, Glacier is 'good enough' for what he needs.
The issue called out at the meeting is many small and mid-sized businesses are going through similar situations where the "IT guy" is solely responsible for the company's business continuance strategy. This is a cause for concern as the technical folks have forgotten more about disaster recovery than most business people have ever considered. The IT person in a situation like this must educate the business executives on the proposed strategy for several reasons. First, it's a CYA-- you have to share the risk of the decision. Don't let it fall on your shoulders. Second, you have to educate the organization so executives are more DR/BC savvy. You must make sure that people understand the DR/BC strategy, buy into it, understand (in whatever terms necessary) RTO and RPO, and understand the tradeoffs of a particular approach.
In this particular case, for example, Poulin will be protecting 3TBs of data. If Poulin decides to go with Glacier, according to some estimates, it could take days and more than $20,000 to retrieve the data, as Amazon limits the amount of data you can retrieve per day and begins charging after that threshold. While the frequency of disasters will be small, the probability of a disaster over a long period of time, where large amounts of corporate data must be retrieved, is quite high. These risks must be communicated to senior management, and they must buy into the strategy.
The Wikibon community recommends five actions in a situation like this:
- Assess the costs - that's table stakes: If the cost reduction opportunities look compelling, look deeper.
- Understand the impact on depreciation: While many small businesses can easily trade CAPEX for OPEX, make sure your CFO will allow this approach.
- Communicate the hidden costs: e.g. in this case the potential recovery costs and other factors such as expertise to leverage Amazon's APIs.
- Run the probabilities: Assume in all likelihood a disaster will strike, run the scenarios with management, and force them to think through the painful situation of losing most or all of your data.
- Over-communicate, document, get buy-in and secure sign off from management.
Action Item: Disaster recovery and business continuance is not solely an IT problem. IT pros must involve the business lines and senior management to ensure they understand not only the capital costs involved but the hidden costs and business impacts of critical DR and BC decisions.
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