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Disaster recovery sites: Part 2 of 2

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In Part 1 of this series, we discussed cold and warm disaster recovery sites and gave reasons for using either. To recap:

  • Cold sites are backup computing environments – complete with power equipment, cooling systems and servers – that are comparatively inexpensive, but that take more time to boot up following an emergency.
  • Warm sites are similar to cold sites, but these have software already installed – and a backup of company data may already exist on-premises – so the recovery time objective for these sites is considerably shorter.

Now, let’s talk about hot DR sites and see how all of these kinds of disaster recovery plans can help your company maintain business continuity in the event of an emergency.

“Hot sites have the shortest RTO.”

Hot sites: Overview

As disaster recovery strategies go, ones that include a hot site are generally top-of-the-line. BizTech Magazine contributor Mike Chapple compared hot sites to Cadillac cars – nice, runs smoothly and generally more expensive than other options. Hot sites are much like warm ones in that the machines are updated with the software and technology necessary to conduct a full backup in the event that the original computing equipment is incapacitated.

The main difference between hot and warm sites, however, is the fact that the backed up data is already loaded onto the machines.

As a result, hot sites have the shortest RTO because there is minimal loading required to get the equipment in working order. It is also the most expensive of the options because your company has to keep this alternate site up and running even when you’re not using it, as a precautionary measure.

Bringing it together

It’s crucial to have a dedicated DR plan so that when the unthinkable occurs, your company isn’t left high and dry with no data or applications. The Institute for Business and Home Safety found that 25 percent of businesses don’t recover from a major disaster, according to the Small Business Administration. You do not want your company to be on that list. So the question remains: What kind of DR site should you invest in?

Is a hot site your best option for business continuity?Is a hot site your best option for business continuity?

An important point to note is that by determining the recovery point objectives for your business-critical data, it may be easier to make a decision concerning the nature of your DR plan. Continuity Central Archive’s Charlie Maclean-Bristol noted that it’s important to assess the maximum tolerable period of disruption – or the amount of time it would take for disruption of business to become unacceptable.

To this end, another option would be to consider utilizing a hybrid approach by combining different capabilities of each of these DR solutions. You may be able to utilize one solution that nets you a shorter RTO, which should be the ultimate goal of any strategy.

Which kind of DR site do you think your company would most benefit from? Contact ISG Technology today for more information about how each could impact business continuity for your specific business.

Disaster recovery sites: Part 1 of 2

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Having an effective disaster recovery plan is a crucial aspect of any business strategy. PC Magazine reported that despite the clear importance of having a good DR plan in place for every level of your business for when the unthinkable happens, an estimated 60 percent of companies that experience data loss will shut their doors within six months, according to the National Archives and Records Administration. Not only that, but 93 percent of companies that lose a data center for more than ten days following a natural or other kind of disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year.

It is clear that when it comes to ensuring business continuity and making the most out of an emergency situation, the plan you have in place can make or break your organization.

There are different kinds of DR plans. In this part 1 of 2, let's take a look at a couple strategies that involve cold and warm sites and see how they can be used in certain events or situations:

1. Cold DR sites

A cold DR server or data center is one that exists to serve as backup infrastructure in the event that the main server is compromised. This kind of backup is useful in situations where the first site were to become completely unviable, as in the case of weather emergencies like fires or hurricanes. When you invest in a cold site, you basically set up a completely new data center, complete with ventilation units, cooling equipment and dedicated servers – but, according to BizTech Magazine's Mike Chapple, everything is dark until it's needed.

These kinds of strategies tend to be less expensive than the others, because companies do not have to maintain heating or electricity costs that fully functioning equipment would incur. The downside to cold sites, however, is that the recovery time objective is often longer, because the equipment has to be booted, applications have to be installed and data has to be loaded from backup tapes.

"It should be no surprise that the recovery time for cold sites is measured in days or weeks rather than in hours," Chapple noted.

"Warm sites can reduce RTO following a disaster."

2. Warm DR sites

Warm disaster recovery backup sites, on the other hand, represent a step up from the cold DR servers as far as RTO is concerned. With a little bit more expense, companies can invest in an off-premises solution that functions similarly to a cold site, except for the fact that the servers boot up every once in a while to do updates based on the replicated equipment – meaning the applications or software required upon disaster recovery would already be loaded onto these servers. Company data is often also stored at a warm site.

This can take RTO down from days or weeks to mere hours or minutes following a disaster. While it is more expensive, for some companies, the risk of having their operations down for days or weeks while a cold site boots up is not feasible. Warm sites, therefore, offer a reduced time frame and better support business continuity practices. However, according to Data Center Knowledge, it takes longer for companies to boot up warm sites than hot ones.

Does your company have a cold or warm DR site?Does your company have a cold or warm DR site?

In Part 2, we will explore hot DR sites and see how to bring all of this information together into a cohesive DR strategy that will positively impact your company. For more information about DR plans and how to implement them, contact ISG Technology today.

What can cloud-based DRaaS bring to your company?

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As businesses are now completely dependent on data and computer systems, Disaster Recovery as a Service is quickly becoming something companies need in order to keep operations running. In fact, Transparency Market Research found that the DRaaS market is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 36 percent through 2022. 

Obviously, a lot of companies are beginning to see the many benefits of outsourcing their disaster recovery needs. That being said, many of these businesses have yet to integrate the cloud into their plans. 

While cloud-based disaster recovery plans aren't for everybody, they actually have many advantages that the average business can benefit from. 

The cloud allows for faster recovery

A lot of the cloud's popularity comes from the massive benefits to efficiency that it offers. This level of efficiency is also seen within disaster recovery plans that are based around cloud services. 

As Bill Claybrook stated in a TechTarget article, much of the cloud's agility in putting a company back on its feet when disaster strikes has to do with its physical server requirements. The cloud needs fewer servers than required by traditional disaster recovery plans, and as such has fewer actions to carry out when executing the plan. This means faster recovery for your company, which translates to less downtime and less money lost. 

Another great benefit of DRaaS is the use of service-level agreements by both the managed service provider and the company receiving the disaster recovery solution. An SLA lays out the MSP's minimum requirements in terms of services provided. In this case, an SLA can define a concrete timeline for disaster recovery, which can give company administrators peace of mind knowing that their business will be up and running within the preordained timeline. 

Costs are lower

When you do disaster recovery in-house, you're basically dumping a lot of extra work on your IT professionals. These employees have a lot of jobs outside of disaster recovery, and DRaaS allows them to fulfill your company's technical goals without being hindered by working on and testing a DR plan. 

Costs are also lowered in terms of hardware when receiving DRaaS. When you outsource your disaster recovery to an MSP, you can rest assured that the vendor has hardware that is far superior to your own. An MSP's livelihood comes from having reliable services, which means having some of the best equipment money can buy. 

This means that you'll be getting the benefits of the best hardware without having to actually pay for it yourself. And considering the fact that a Databarracks survey found that 21 percent of data loss events occur due to hardware failure, you can rest assured that your MSP's equipment will work better and longer than your own. 

That being said, the cloud isn't for everyone. Some companies simply need on-site disaster recovery, while others would benefit from a hybrid of these solutions.

Thankfully, ISG Technology makes choosing a DR solution simple. With services ranging from cloud-based, hybrid or even on-site disaster recovery models, ISG Technology can help your company develop a plan to increase business continuity and decrease downtime. 

What to consider when making the leap into the hybrid cloud

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Over the past few years, the hybrid cloud has emerged as the deployment model of choice for businesses that want to enjoy the scalability and flexibility of hosted solutions, but are not yet ready to move every single critical asset to such an environment. This approach allows organizations to maintain some amount of control over their resources while still supporting further expansion into the cloud. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that so many businesses view the hybrid cloud as the ideal way to strike a balance between governance and agility.

According to a December 2014 IDC report, around 65 percent of enterprise-scale IT operations will have fully supported the hybrid cloud by the end of 2015. Cloud and virtualization security strategist Andrea Knoblauch commented in a Cloud Best Practices piece that this surging interest in hybrid could be largely chalked up to its ability to easily provide many of the performance and procurement benefits associated with the cloud, while leaving ample room for further customization down the road if necessary.

"Simply put, hybrid clouds provide all the benefits of a regular cloud environment such as integration, networking, management and security, but applied to a partially internal environment," she wrote. "This means an organization can start with in-house computing resources, add external cloud resources to scale up and then go back and replace those cloud sources either with more on-premise infrastructure, or continue to leverage cloud solutions to balance manageability and security with the low-cost benefits of outsourcing to cloud providers where it makes sense."

Businesses should take care to follow a solid migration strategy when moving to a hybrid cloud deployment.Businesses should take care to follow a solid migration strategy when moving to a hybrid cloud deployment.

IDC researchers noted that in light of the hybrid cloud's growing popularity, organizations will have to make some fundamental changes in the way they operate in order to accommodate this new environment. With that in mind, here are a few key factors to consider when planning a hybrid cloud deployment:

Lay out a strategy
It may be tempting to begin moving assets to the cloud without first figuring out the details about what that hybrid environment will ultimately look like. However, as TechTarget noted, that is more often than not a recipe for disaster. Moving anything to the cloud can present its own set of challenges, so it is important to plan accordingly at the outset of any cloud migration project, whether it be a private, public or hybrid deployment. 

There are a few basic ways organizations can go about migrating to the cloud. While a "life and shift" approach may appeal to business leaders due to its relative simplicity, it can bring with it a number of issues that will prevent stakeholders from extracting the cloud's full potential. Instead, as Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal told TechTarget, a preferable method would be to alter code within the apps that have been targeted for migration, making the whole process much easier. Organizations can go even further and make more drastic changes to the code to essentially transform on-premises assets into full-blown cloud applications.

Prepping apps for migration is just one critical step in the preparation process. Speaking with TechTarget, Altisource CTO Girish Juneja recommended adhering to two other primary best practices when crafting a cloud deployment strategy: establishing permanent fundamental configurations and developing strong security measures.

"No organization has to go through the cloud migration process alone."

Establish a connection between clouds
At the heart of the hybrid cloud is the notion that the public and private clouds should work in tandem, allowing businesses to leverage the benefits of both while minimizing their drawbacks. In practice, this might mean that apps hosted in public and private clouds will need to interact, necessitating some degree of connection and communication between the two environments. As TechTarget explained, cloud management and orchestration solutions can be essential here, helping businesses oversee and manage their complex cloud setups.

The thing to keep in mind during all of this is that no organization has to go through the cloud migration process alone. By working with qualified managed services providers, businesses can ensure that they lay out a roadmap to success in the cloud. Furthermore, these third parties can help optimize cloud deployments after they have been launched, improving the performance of such environments over time.

What are some top benefits of hybrid cloud computing?

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As the technology industry continues to advance and new capabilities are discovered every day, one of the biggest improvements on traditional IT infrastructure comes in the form of the hybrid cloud. Where private and public architectures offer distinct advantages depending on what the computing needs of a company may be, hybrid strategies can bring together the best of both worlds.

"The hybrid cloud market is expected to be worth an astounding $84.6 billion in 2019."

The hybrid cloud market is growing at a rapid pace. Earlier this year, RightScale's State of the Cloud 2015 survey indicated that 82 percent of enterprise respondents had deployed a hybrid strategy within their companies – an 8 percent increase over 2014. In addition, the hybrid cloud market is expected to be worth an astounding $84.6 billion in 2019, according to research published by MarketsandMarkets. This growth will come at a compound annual rate of 27.3 percent from 2014 to 2019.

What do these numbers mean? Among other things, they are an indication of the growing popularity of hybrid cloud migrations. As businesses consistently turn to some form of cloud computing to provide them with the right data analytics tools and storage solutions, the fact that the overwhelming majority are using hybrid infrastructure points to the versatility and possible cost-savings associated with these kinds of environments.

But why is the hybrid cloud so popular? Let's take a look at a few reasons enterprises and small businesses continue to choose an integrated solution over the alternative:

1. Gives companies a choice
Hybrid cloud computing brings together all the good parts about public and private offerings and integrates them into one well-managed solution. In this way, companies can run applications that require capabilities only offered by the public cloud while simultaneously storing their more confidential data on private cloud servers.

The federal government is one high-profile organization with an eye on the cloud. According to CloudTech, the IDG indicated that in 2014, the feds spent $1.7 billion on private cloud and $118.3 million on public. The combination of both platforms has allowed for greater flexibility within IT infrastructure.

Integrating private and public cloud offerings can make a difference in IT flexibility and efficiency.Integrating private and public cloud offerings can make a difference in IT flexibility and efficiency.

2. Cost savings and efficiency
With hybrid strategies, companies can pick what they want to store in different cloud environments. This leads to distinct benefits, including cost-reducing advantages. Research firm Gartner revealed that one of the biggest benefits of hybrid cloud is the impact it can ultimately have on a company's pocketbook. In particular, capital expenditures can decrease dramatically over traditional IT systems, since investment in and maintenance of physical machines is no longer necessary.

In addition, according to Network​ World contributor Robert J. Gibbons, Jr., the inherent financial advantage that comes from investing in these kinds of IT solutions can be augmented by creating data backups and utilizing cloud storage services. Disaster recovery strategies are crucial for any business, and hybrid IT allows managers to determine where mission-critical data needs to be stored in case of an emergency.

The bottom line is that companies can save money and strengthen their IT infrastructure by investing in hybrid cloud. Not to mention maintaining your environments doesn't have to be a hassle. When you partner with a certified managed services provider, IT management can be simplified and you can cut down on complexities that might slow down your operations.

3 reasons your company needs a disaster recovery plan right now

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Disaster recovery is one of those uncomfortable topics that people generally don't like to talk about. Discussing the possibility of a catastrophic event knocking out business is stressful, and it can seem a lot easier to just put the conversation off for later.

But disasters don't wait for you to be prepared. They hit companies whenever and however they want, and if you aren't ready for them you could end up losing quite a lot of business.

To stress the importance of being prepared as soon as possible, let's take a look at the top three reasons you need a disaster recovery plan right now:

1. Disaster recovery plans help you reassess the importance of your data
Whether you know it or not, your company creates a lot of data simply by conducting business as usual. This data could be as vital as information needed to complete a big project, or it could be as inconsequential as a list of office birthdays that someone in HR created.

Obviously, this first dataset is more important than the second, and as such needs to be accessible during a disaster. When creating a disaster recovery plan, you'll have to sit down and parse through a lot of the data your company has created to separate the mission-critical information from the materials you don't absolutely need. 

Not only will this give you a deeper look into what your company needs in order to function properly, it will also help you cull the information that is no longer necessary but has simply been forgotten or pushed to the side. Efficiency is key, and this is especially true when creating a disaster recovery solution.

2. It's not about if, but when
Regardless of your industry, the size of your company and whatever your current business model, only one thing is certain: Disaster is coming. It may not be today or tomorrow or anytime soon, but it's coming. According to a survey commissioned by EMC Corporation and conducted by Vanson Bourne, 64 percent of the participating enterprises reported experiencing downtime or data loss within the last 12 months.

The fact that this survey questioned 3,300 IT decision-makers from 24 countries shows this isn't a problem contained in a single country or industry. Rather, unexpected downtime can and does affect a vast majority of businesses. This is especially true for the 51 percent of those surveyed who said their organizations lacked a disaster recovery plan for emerging workloads. These companies simply weren't prepared for when the worst happens. 

Having a disaster recovery plan in place is a lot like having an umbrella. You don't need it until it starts raining, and then you really need it. 

Unlike an umbrella, however, failing to have a disaster recovery plan in place won't end with your new haircut getting a little wet. In fact, being unprepared for a disastrous event that knocks out your ability to conduct business could end up costing your company a lot of time, frustration and money. 

3. Downtime is extremely expensive
Not being able to go about business as usual can have multiple negative effects on your company. That being said, the easiest problem to quantify is the money lost during downtime. The EMC survey found that data loss and unexpected downtime costs businesses $1.7 trillion every year.

To put that into perspective, the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom was $2.94 trillion dollars in 2014. Unexpected downtime is costing enterprises across the globe more than half of the entire GDP of a first-world nation. This isn't some small problem to be dealt with later; this is a massive epidemic that must be addressed now. 

If your company doesn't currently have a disaster recovery plan in place, make sure to contact ISG Technology. With more than 30 years of disaster recovery experience, ISG Technology can help you make sure your business stays afloat when disaster comes. 

Study confirms deep connection between disaster recovery and business continuity

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A study conducted by Databarracks revealed that most people within the field of IT see disaster recovery and business continuity as codependent – and rightfully so. The survey of 404 IT professionals from 19 different business sectors revealed that 88 percent of these IT workers had a specific disaster recovery plan embedded within their business continuity plan. Furthermore, 7 percent of businesses that currently had a business continuity plan without a disaster recovery solution planned on creating one within the next year. 

These numbers simply speak to the importance of disaster recovery solutions, as well as the often forgotten difference – and link – between disaster recovery and business continuity.

Many people think these terms are interchangeable, however, the reality is that disaster recovery is simply the portion of a business continuity plan that has to do with saving data to prepare for a disastrous event. Business continuity as a whole sees the bigger picture by trying to get the entire business back to working order, as opposed to just scraping by after a calamitous event.. 

What types of disasters are hitting IT?
The Databarracks survey also had some interesting information about the leading causes of data loss within the IT industry. The study found that 24 percent of disastrous events resulting in lost data were the result of human error.

This is just above hardware failure, which was second with 21 percent. What this means is that companies need to keep the mistakes of their employees in mind when in the process of creating a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. 

Thankfully, professionals in the disaster recovery and business continuity field like ISG Technology can help companies navigate the tricky process of creating these types of plans. With over 30 years of disaster recovery experience, ISG Technology has a team of experts that can work to create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan that is right for your business. 

How hyperconverged infrastructure can benefit remote branches

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Businesses that are experiencing a period of rapid expansion may seem like they have it made, but there is a downside to that growth. When enterprises scale up and build out their corporate footprint, they will likely be faced with numerous challenges supporting satellite offices and remote branches. Relying on legacy IT assets to provide the compute, storage and network resources required by additional company locations can be a costly decision. However, business leaders can find some relief in these situations by considering a shift to hyperconverged infrastructure and changing the way enterprise operations are scaled and expanded.

For years, IT environments have been characterized by system silos. Core assets such as storage and compute resources have traditionally been handled separately. What hyperconverged infrastructure does is condense a large percentage of these assets into a single bundle of hardware and software. As TechTarget noted, organizations can then build out these systems by integrating additional nodes when needed. With this arrangement, maintenance teams can avoid many of the everyday headaches experienced while overseeing IT infrastructure on an enterprise scale.

"Under the converged infrastructure approach, a vendor provides a pre-configured bundle of hardware and software in a single chassis with the goal of minimizing compatibility issues and simplifying management," TechTarget stated.

Scale up operations with ease
One of the main benefits here for enterprises is the ability to expand IT resource needs in a simple and efficient fashion. Hyperconverged.org cited the easy scalability of hyperconverged infrastructure as one of the approach's top selling points, comparing the addition of nodes to erecting a structure with LEGO blocks. The authors noted that this method allows businesses to easily build out their IT assets on an as-needed basis. This makes enterprise expansion a much less bitter of a pill to swallow for business leaders as scaling up to support remote branches and satellite offices is not quite as arduous a task as it was in the past.

Hyperconverged infrastructure enables IT teams to manage enterprise assets from a central location.Hyperconverged infrastructure enables IT teams to manage enterprise assets from a central location.

Lower investment, management costs
Due to this setup of adding onto existing infrastructure whenever needed, hyperconverged infrastructure allows for enterprise expansion to occur at a lower up-front cost. As Hyperconverged.org explained, this approach reduces the "step size" required to make a leap in terms of infrastructure scope and maturity.

"The bigger the step size, the longer it takes to fully utilize new resources added through the expansion," Hyperconverged.org stated. "A smaller step size results in a far more efficient use of resources. As new resources are required, it's easy to add nodes to a hyperconverged infrastructure."

This approach to IT infrastructure and management further lowers costs by enabling businesses to support critical systems with commodity hardware. Because many core processes are handled at the software level within hyperconverged infrastructure, organizations do not need to consistently upgrade their data center hardware with the most advanced equipment available. In most cases, commodity x86 hardware will be sufficient to keep everything running smoothly while also allowing for rapid enterprise expansion.

"Commodity x86 hardware will be sufficient to keep everything running smoothly."

Reduce IT challenges
It's not just the bookkeepers and executives who will see the appeal of embracing hyperconverged infrastructure. For IT members, there is a lot to like here, especially when working with multiple sites and remote offices. Because this setup condenses and centralizes IT infrastructure, teams tasked with overseeing that equipment and handling any maintenance needs will have far fewer headaches to deal with.

Jointly developed by Hyperconverged.org and ActualTech Media, the "2015 State of Hyperconverged Infrastructure Market Report" shed light on the challenges that enterprise IT staff regularly face. The mix of on-premises and off-premises assets to manage, the ever-escalating virtualization and disaster recovery needs along with the growing complexity of today's data center environments have all made IT work incredibly challenging within large businesses. Hyperconvergence addresses these difficulties by providing IT teams with a single resource pool to draw from, allowing them to easily maintain a sprawling enterprise-scale system from a central location.

Building out a business's footprint can present new opportunities for market growth and tapping into additional revenue streams. However, the hit in CAPEX and OPEX can make some enterprise leaders wary of developing remote branches. Hyperconverged infrastructure offers a way to reduce the cost and complexity of such projects, enabling organizations to take more aggressive action within their industries and stake out new territory when the moment arises.

As enterprises become larger, they will need to address the headaches that come part and parcel with any organizational growth. Hyperconvergence provides a way to reduce or eliminate those challenges, allowing for greater heights of success.

Backup's role in disaster recovery

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The easiest way to give a computer-savvy person a heart attack is to tell them you don't back up your data. Not backing up important information is a lot like driving a car without a seatbelt: You'll probably be fine 99.99 percent of the time, but that .01 percent could ruin your life.

In the same way, not investing in online backup services for important company data could be the death of a business when disaster strikes. Much like a seatbelt, you never really need your data backed up until you need it. And then you really need it. 

But despite the fact that backup is a key component to making it through a trying time, it is certainly no replacement for an actual disaster recovery plan. 

A backup horror story
Many people think that simply backing up data is the only thing necessary to deal with a troublesome event. This could not be further from the truth, and IT professionals at the Parish of Orleans Civil District Court in Louisiana can attest to this. On Oct. 25, 2010, both of the servers holing all of the conveyance and mortgage records for the courthouse crashed without any warning. Thankfully, the courthouse had paid for online backup services and had all of its data stored offsite. 

Or so it thought.

As it turns out, the company that had been handling the online backup had sent out a software update to all of its clients a little while before the crash. Although the IT department at the courthouse believed that they had installed the update, it turned out that they had not. This resulted in the courthouse losing digital mortgage records from the past year. 

Thankfully, paper copies did exist for all the lost data, but the point here is that this courthouse relied solely on data backup rather than having a good disaster recovery plan in place – and lost big because of it. Backup is a great first step toward planning for a disastrous event, but that's all it is: a first step. The next step, and perhaps the most important one, is developing a disaster recovery plan with a firm that specializes in them. 

This is why ISG Technology is such an interesting and powerful ally. Specializing in both online backup services and disaster recovery, ISG allows businesses to combine both of these services into a protective shield to fend off business continuity problems. 

Business continuity and brand image

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Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. In business terms, this means that downtime is simply inevitable. And while downtime is extremely expensive in terms of getting business up and running again, yet another extreme expense it causes is a damaged brand image. Disaster recovery planning is perhaps the most important part of a company’s brand. This is because of the huge stress clients put on consistency and data protection with the companies they do business with.

Consistency is key
Being able to do business in a consistent and reliable manner is what separates successful companies from the ones that fall by the wayside. As Kristi Jackson, founder of Women CEO Project, stated, “consistency helps build trust with consumers and other businesses because they see your brand or results frequently and know you mean business.” When a person walks into an Italian restaurant, it’s because they want Italian food. If they arrive one day and find the restaurant is serving sushi – or worse, no food at all – they are going to be extremely disappointed with their visit. The same can be applied to any other business. If a business has had a lot of downtime due to poor disaster recovery, clients are going to be frustrated.

This is exactly why business continuity plans are so important to a business’s clients. As Continuity Insights stated, a company’s brand belongs to the clients more than it does to the company itself. This is because clients can help build a company’s brand image or destroy it if they see fit.

Robust business continuity plans, such as those offered by ISG Technology, right the ship when things are not going well. The reason a good plan is so important is because it guides how employees act in a crisis. DisasterRecovery.org explained that when companies have good business continuity plans, employees can take a more educated and confident role in the company’s recovery process. This means less panic on the side of the employees, which means less downtime for the company, which means less money and brand image lost. Getting the company back on its feet after a run in with a disaster is at the heart of consistency and good brand imaging, and should be a key concern for those trying to take their business to the next level.