Several events in the past five years have dictated a shift in thinking regarding how companies recover from a disaster. While most large organizations have had a second data center for recovery either because it made sense or for ease of restoration, smaller companies relied on the tried and true hotsite. A hot site is a shared service site that would accommodate multiple organizations for disaster recovery operations.

As many companies saw during the blackouts, hurricanes and terrorist attacks, the hot site was not the disaster recovery life insurance policy that was promised. The methodology works fine for a contained event that does not affect a large geographic area. However, when there is a widespread event, such as 9/11, the hot site is quickly overwhelmed with multiple companies who simultaneously declare a disaster. These sites cannot accommodate everyone in the facility they have been accustomed to using.

Couple triage fashion that a shared site strategy uses when disasters are declared with regulatory concerns and we see a trend toward bringing disaster recovery in-house. This phenomenon is referred to as DR insourcing.

FICON technology is an enabler to insourcing DR much more cost effectively than it would be with ESCON. In addition, FICON’s performance advantages when compared with ESCON make it the technology of choice for meeting RPO and RTO objectives.