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Full page newspaper ads, vendors' shrill Sarbanes-Oxley warnings and nightmarish downtime descriptions harken back to 1999.

Bottom line: Disaster recovery and business continuity planning is necessary.

But rarely is the effectiveness of those plans measured in dollars spent, and, as Mark Vanston pointed out in a February 2004 Meta Group report, much of that spending is "exorbitant and … completely unnecessary."
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In his report, Vanston extols the common sense view that enterprises must decide which functions and applications are indeed mission critical and prioritize accordingly. Vanston flat out nails it when he says that much disaster recovery and business continuity spending is "exorbitant and, for much of the business function, completely unnecessary."

Other software/hardware vendors may howl. Oh well.

What's the tipping point? When does prudence become panic?

We -- Corigelan LLC -- are a Chicago-based disaster recovery/business continuity consultancy comprised of former top execs from disaster recovery pioneer Comdisco. We basically created this industry several years ago and thus are the best able to inject some common sense today.

Being vendor independent allows us to make objective recommendations for our clients and we almost always conclude that firms can achieve airtight and documentable recovery and continuity functionality by re-leveraging the assets (human, technology and facilities) that they already have.

So while the sky is not falling, things may get downright gloomy for CIOs who have over-spent for disaster recovery planning or - worse - neglected this vital function. This is especially timely as the economic rebound has opened up technology budgets and local CIOs are getting barraged by vendors. They should know that prudent, effective disaster recovery planning need not dominate the budget.

Copyright © 2004. Enterprise Innovator.