What we can learn from the Sony data loss: A Disaster Recovery in the Cloud Lesson

Disruptions are all too frequent and have significant business impact

We need to look at Sony to realize that Disaster Recovery(DR) is actually a really complicated process and doing it well requires a lot of practice, time and effort. Sony had to execute their Disaster Recovery plan, after being wiped out of data after someone stole it. It took them over three weeks to get back online so they can function again as a company.

They thought they were doing the right thing but it turned out that this is way more complicated than they had it first and that is the story of DR, it is never complicated until you actually need it.

Business Impact of Disruptions

As a result of what is your most significant disruption which of the following turned out to be the greatest impact on your organization? Enterprises give productivity 72%, loss of employee morale 37% and loss of business opportunity 37%, customer confidence loss, corporate reputation damage, loss of partner trust, customer compensation, these are all things but the most worrying thing is employee productivity.

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After all Sony employees ended up filing in a class-action suit against them after their personal data was hacked. The business people kept yelling at the IT department people as to when they are going to get back online during the disaster. This is the kind of stuff the IT department was dealing with during the time they were dealing with everything else. They were dealing with angry employees. 

If you are not taking the effort and time to put all these things under control, and all of this strategy in place to actually respond to disasters you are impacting your customer relationships. You are impacting your brand. You are talking about your reputation and you really are impacting your employees, and you shouldn't underestimate how bad employee morale can come back to hurt you in the long run. These are all significant business impacts - employee productivity and morale.

Today’s DR Challenge

Leaders need to extend the architecture to a greater number of Apps and systems. Two thirds of the applications we have in our environment we should have a Backup and Disaster Recovery for, and mission-critical ones should have a continuity plan attached to them.

Across datacenters, distributed locations, this is all really important, satellite offices. There are no global organizations that do not have global offices. Or large US organizations that don't have more than one national office.