Oracle Magazine - September/October 2007 - Marcelo Machado

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
An Ounce
of Prevention
A well-planned, strategic approach to disaster recovery has helped
Dell strengthen its infrastructure—and provided some valuable lessons
about keeping enterprise systems up and running.
Dell IT’s comprehensive
disaster recovery plan
takes into account critical
operations such as the
Enterprise Command Center
above, which provides
vital customer support.
It has become a truism in business that IT is
a strategic asset that is vital to the operation
of companies. A few years ago, however,
Dell decided to take a deeper look at just what
that meant.
To start, executives asked a fairly straightforward
question: What would it cost the business
if the company’s main data center were destroyed?
The Dell IT group determined that it could take as
long as 12 weeks to get things back up and
running, and then worked with business people
to determine what that would mean to areas such
as sales, manufacturing, shipping, and service.
“When you multiplied that impact out across that
time frame, needless to say, the lost-revenue
figure was huge,” says Debi Higdon, Dell’s Global
Disaster Recovery test manager.
With that financial assessment in hand, it was
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