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The business impacts that are assessed in a business continuity planning process are often driven by self-imposed assumptions - and even more often, wrong ones. A good example is the now antiquated "72 hour rule," which required citizens to be self-sustaining for 3 days following a disaster. You don't have to have a pandemic or hurricane to easily exceed 72 hours. However, in other kinds of disasters from earthquakes to human error or even malice, it may be shorter or longer than that before you can restore operations.

• An earthquake in Hawaii last fall caused 8 hours of downtime at Kuakini Health Systems in Honolulu, bringing down its patient care applications that prevented doctors from providing anything but the most basic care.
• A financial services firm recently had a 7 hour outage of a critical customer-facing application (someone made an uncontrolled change that corrupted the SAN), which costs it several hundred customers and an estimated $1-2 million in revenue.

Neither of these cases had backup sites for restoring mission-critical applications. And the impact was significant with only 8 hours of downtime...not 72 hours. It all comes down to complexity and cost for replicating a secondary disaster recovery server environment for every primary server. Large enterprises can have tens of thousands of servers spread out over multiple data centers around the world. Building and maintaining a complex data center environment twice is too expensive. What if you were able to have a single secondary site back-up multiple primary sites and the technology enabled recovery in minutes? This would mean you no longer need a 2N DR strategy (a stand-by site for every active site). On February 13, the US Patent Office will issue Patent #7,178,059 to Egenera for Disaster Recovery for Processing Resources Using Configurable Deployment Platform...or as we call it, N+1 DR. DR doesn't have to be complex.  And it definitely doesn't have to be cost-prohibitive.