Benchmarks for state-of-the-art RTO and RPO are one thing if your enterprise is already up to date with business continuity and disaster recovery. But these metrics — and affordable DR — can seem awfully abstract in the real world, I am discovering from CIOs, especially if the real world is the globe.

I recently got an email from Jiten Patel, CIO of the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA International), an amazing not-for-profit that provides microfinance services to the world’s lowest-income entrepreneurs. You’d think with its 25-year successful history of village banking, not to mention high-profile support from uber-connected celebrities like actress Natalie Portman, FINCA would not be at a loss for good DR. And, indeed, setting an RPO and RTO benchmark for FINCA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., “is an easy conversation.”

But there was Patel, on business in Baku, Azerbaijan, explaining the difficulty of providing affordable DR at its microfinance operations in 21 countries around the globe:

“DR options in the developing countries are fairly limited and expensive propositions, and not something we can afford to have in place in every country. And unlike in the US where we have the likes of Sungard and IBM who offer such services at a reasonable cost, this is not the case in countries where we operate — one has to buy a box, which may sit there ‘cobwebbed’ — which is not a viable option and it adds to the financial burden.

“In light of this my strategy has been to centralize our infrastructure on a region-by-region basis, to use 3rd-party hosting providers who can provide more robust redundancy options, and to try and negotiate more affordable DR pricing, which where we can makes it much more palatable for the likes of us.

“It would be a boon for all of us NGOs who operate globally, if someone like Sungard or IBM offered such services at very affordable rates around the globe: Offering it just in the US for far -lung global operations is not viable.”

The world may be getting flatter, but the playing field is far from level when it comes to DR. And it is just a hunch, but disasters that shred data must be common in countries where electricity on any given day is not a given.

The WSJ piece said the planned IBM layoffs show that even profitable companies continue to cut costs— “some of them by taking advantage of cheaper Asian labor.”

It can’t be long, with or without a purchase of Satyam, that someone suggests the I in IBM stands for India. But that, it seems, would be selling IBM short.

In a round of layoffs made earlier this year (an estimated 2,800 by some reports), IBM lived up to its International moniker. The company offered laid-off employees in good standing and willing to work under local conditions and terms the opportunity to go work offshore at one of IBM’s centers — not only in India, but also in Nigeria, Russia, Argentina, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Turkey and United Arab Emirates. Not surprisingly, Project Match sparked a strong rebuke from labor unions slamming the Armonk, N.Y., provider for not only offshoring jobs to low-cost countries but now wanting employees to offshore themselves.

It will be interesting to see if IBM makes the same offer to laid-off employees this time around.