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Step 3: Ensure buy-in
Getting money for something you hope you never have to use can be difficult. DR can be expensive and doesn't generate revenue. ROI can be hard to gauge.
IT should advise and execute, but overall responsibility for DR should be vested in line-of-business owners. CIOs should make a case for DR investment so that the business owners can go after the funding. Finding metrics to measure DR can be hard, but IT should at least measure the effective-ness of any solution during a test.
Krojnewski suggests building standard BC/DR service classes and measuring the disaster recovery spending per service as a percentage of operational costs. Evaluate the technologies in each class every other year.
"Buy-in has become easier at those firms where the business executives know that they're dependent on IT," says Krojnewski. "But some businesses just don't have a good relationship with IT, and it's difficult to get sponsorship for a DR budget. Where IT is looked at as a cost center, it can be hard to get business executives interested in DR unless they're pushed by regulatory agencies."
At the House of LaRose, Brinegar went to management after the New Year's Eve outage and campaigned for a DR plan. "We were down for what could have been a couple of days," says Brinegar. "It was only six hours, but [management] gave me a check so I could do what I needed to do. My position was, 'Look at what could have happened and how many millions we could have lost.' It was the first time I was told 'Buy something' before I even left the room. Usually it's months of debating and no decision. Management understood. We were very vulnerable."
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