Knowledge is Power

I borrowed my title for today’s post from the section heading of a whitepaper, “Impact on U.S. Small Business of Natural & Man-Made Disasters,” that I found on Edwards Information, LLC. For those of you who don’t know them, Edwards Information is a valuable information resource for organizations, and they describe themselves as “the authority on disaster recovery and business continuity.”

The full document, which was presented by HP and SCORE, is available here. I think every CEO, every IT professional, every CFO, every Risk Manager, and every Business Continuity professional should read the entire article, but I want to draw attention to some specific data from page 3 of the document:

Here are the publisher’s references for the information:

• 1 Jon Toiga, Disaster Recovery Planning: Managing Risk and Catastrophe in Information Systems, (Yourdon Press, 1989)
• 2 “Open For Business” a publication of The Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a nonprofit association that engages in communication, education, engineering and research for the insurance industry. See www.ibhs.org/docs/OpenForBusiness.pdf
• 3 Contingency Planning, Strategic Research Corp and DTI/Price Waterhouse Coopers (2004) and is widely quoted in places such as: Diana Shepstone, National data awareness project launched to help businesses prevent data disasters ( Data Centre Solutions, Jan. 8, 2007) see: http://www.datacentresols.com/news/articles-full.php?newsid=5455
• 4 University of Texas Center for Research on Information Systems, as cited in Datamation, June 14, 1994
• 5 Jonathan Bernstein, president, Bernstein Crisis Management, LLC in Director, June 1998, v51n11, p44
• 6 Bruce Blythe, CEO, Crisis Management International in Blindsided: A Manager’s Guide to Catastrophic Incidents in the Workplace By Bruce T. Blythe (Portfolio Hardcover, August 22, 2002)
• 7 http://www.techworld.com/cmsdata/whitepapers/833/How%20Secure%20is%20your%20Storage_Symantec.pdf.
• 8 The Hartford’s Guide to Emergency Preparedness Planning, created by The Hartford Financial Services Group and now published by J.J. Keller & Associates

As Hector Barreto, a former SBA administrator was quoted in the article, “…(N)o matter where you live, there’s always the potential for a major disaster. No one is insulated from the threat of losses caused by wind,  storms, floods and wildfires, power outages and other natural and man-made disasters.”

But, knowledge is power, and risk can be controlled. Given the increasingly critical role that IT systems and data play in the ability of an organization to operate, the knowledge from this research provides compelling arguments for data protection and IT disaster recovery investments.