Dell sees business continuity as growth area

And users really should be doing more 'What if...' planning

Dell is honing its focus on business continuity, seeing the area as a key way to increase upgrade cycles, especially in areas such as storage.

The direct vendor recently commissioned research which found 37 per cent of respondents do not plan for business continuity in the event of a disaster. Of those that do, almost a third have had to fall back on their disaster recovery plan at some stage.

Steve Lewis, director Dell Enterprise Business, said not having business continuity plans can have "dramatic consequences" for business of all sizes. Larger companies can lose a lot of money as a result, smaller businesses can even go out of business as the result of a fire, burglary or some other unforeseen event.

In recent times Dell has been positioning itself as a more complete provider of computing, increasingly focusing on servers, storage and services. Earlier this year it showed off a testing facility in Ireland and has targeted mid-range storage through its partnership with specialist EMC.

On the subject of upgrading to storage infrastructure such as storage area networks, Lewis said: "We have a whole range of EMC customers out there who can be moved to new technology."

And the approach also works for getting Dell kit into departments that have traditionally been the preserve of rivals such as HP, IBM and Sun.

"Storage is a good proposition for us to lead on. For example it could be an HP data centre but [the user] is agnostic on business continuity," he added.

TNS Business Services carried out the latest business continuity research but separate findings from Meta Group have broken down the cost of not planning business continuity - in other words, how much downtime costs - by sector. Top of the list come energy, telecoms and the financial sectors. Almost at the bottom is media.