Posts Tagged ‘Acceptable Risk’

Have you ever used this phrase?

Well, I guess that’s a risk I’m just going to have to take.

I’ll admit, I’ve said it myself, and it’s usually because either:

1. I don’t think the risk is real
2. I think the risk is low enough, that I’m willing to take a chance
3. I think the risk is real, but avoiding the risk seems impossible
4. I think the risk is avoidable, but the cost to eliminate the risk seems too high

One of my friends told me about  a guy who likes to drive fast cars, so he rented an hour in one of last year’s race cars, took a lesson from a professional driver, and then had a chance to drive by himself on a race track. What better place to safely try your hand at driving fast!  The race track offered him an insurance policy for $70 that would cover any damage to the very fast and expensive car.  Confident that he was sufficiently trained and that driving a car built for speed on a track designed for fast cars was an acceptable risk, he declined the insurance.  Unfortunately, you guessed it, he wrecked the car, and it cost him over $100,000 to pay for the damages.

Many data center managers think like this guy. They view the risk of data loss as relatively unlikely. After all, the important data is protected by RAID and backed up on a regular schedule.  They might even use asynchronous replication to copy most of the data to another location. These things do protect against most data-loss risk.  Many of the other risks are relatively rare; things like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, and building collapse.  Perhaps they think that this risk is sufficiently low that they represent acceptable risks.  It’s a risk they are willing to take.  But what if the company takes the wrong bet? As with the wannabe race car driver, the cost of being wrong is huge. And what if protecting against the other risks was as affordable as the $70 insurance policy?  Shouldn’t the company buy it?

Think about what is possible with Axxana’s Phoenix System. It’s time to re-evaluate the notion of acceptable risk in your data center and your disaster recovery plan.