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Backup system failures have become more commonplace as businesses cut back on IT spending. SmallBusiness.co.uk investigates how companies can minimise risks.

Over the past decade, most enterprises have drafted and rehearsed contingency plans for dealing with backup system related disruptions to their business.

Such plans include scenarios for extreme weather and natural disasters, pandemics, criminal acts and terrorism. But often, considerable disruption can be triggered by a simple and initially minor technical fault.

Clothing retailer American Eagle Outfitters lost eight days of online trading following the failure of systems supporting its website. According to reports, two backup disks disks failed, as did a backup utility. A disaster recovery site, designed to take over, was not in a ready state to take over.

According to some, such failures are increasingly commonplace as businesses try to cut back on IT spending. 'The financial crisis has forced companies to make decisions they would not otherwise have done,' says Ray Stanton, global head of business continuity, security and governance at BT. 'Some have not made investments, or have opted to defer business security exercises for a year.'

There are various precautions that businesses can take to keep the system failures that might snowball into long-term disruption to a minimum. Root cause analysis when incidents occur and inspecting trouble tickets from IT support systems can provide advanced warning of a potential outage. 'That data will show where you have potential problems,' says John Morency, research vice president covering business continuity at Gartner.

Recent technological developments such as storage area networks, virtualisation and cloud computing have boosted the resilience of IT systems. But reducing the failure rate of individual systems can only go so far when it comes to mitigating the risk of IT downtime. In most cases it isn't a single incident that causes the outage but a combination of unanticipated events. Businesses might have a plan to withstand one failure but it is when a second or third system fails that outages begin to affect customers.

Addressing this danger calls for a risk management approach, requiring businesses to determine which of their systems are the most critical and which should be the priority for protection as well as restoration.

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