Engaging the gamblers

Most entrepreneurial business owners will tell you they are prepared to take a gamble rather than incur unnecessary costs. The concept of business continuity might sound appealing, but why would they fork out significant sums of money to pay for something they may never need?

As an integrator it is difficult to construct a straight return on investment argument for business continuity without employing 'what if' scenarios. But some more creative approaches are used these days in an attempt to get customers signing on the dotted line.

"The challenge for us all is to change the conversation to the deliverability of services rather than whether CRM and HR systems are secure, online and available. Once we train our sales force to have those discussions, you will find that other discussions around cost become easier because it's not really expensive anymore," Fujitsu's Perry Delaney said.

"I spoke to a customer recently that was talking about recording all the streaming data off video cameras because the falling cost of disc means they can do it now. IT budgets aren't shrinking; they are growing but doing a hell of a lot more than they used to do. We have got to evolve the conversation to talk about the challenges coming into their organisation or those presented by servicing their own staff."

Dimension Data's Steven Boi said it has started turning the conversation around. Instead of pitching a DR site, it encourages customers to build a small test and development environment because it is much easier to make a business case. As a bonus, a couple of tweaks makes it a perfectly acceptable DR site that can be used as needed.

"Most business managers resent, and will resist at all costs, something they are not going to get a return on," Boi said. "We all know that so unless we frame the conversations differently, and show them what they can get out of investing a little bit of money creatively, we will all struggle to get proposals to the next stage."

Inventive approaches like this are starting to unlock doors much more effectively than the fear, uncertainty and doubt that has been peddled for so long.

"As an industry we have been trying the scare tactics for years and it has never caused a rush to solve DR problems. Gone are the days when you can convince somebody to put a heap of equipment in a lights-out centre just so they know it's there," CA's Jason Shannon said.

"DR means a lot of different things to different organisations so there's a need to spend time with the customer and help IT. As much as we would all like to be selling to business, it's not as simple as knocking on the owner's door and having a conversation.

"We need to work closer with partners and help them narrow the field of DR so it becomes bite-sized chunks that can be managed over time - eventually customers will get to where they want to be."