Fed up of calling a company only to be told the system’s down? Even worse, has this happened to your company? This is terrible for business and you risk customers going elsewhere – so what do you do about it? Well firstly, don’t worry, help is at hand. Perform Risk & Business Impact Analysis to understand where the real problems are, then implement the right Business Continuity strategy for your business and your data.
Anybody who’s heard this knows how frustrating it can be. Whether you’re calling a supplier or your local bank, it’s a real inconvenience. Maybe it’s a company you’re calling for the first time – what chance of you calling them again?
The most frustrating point of all is that this doesn’t have to be the case. There is no excuse for any company to suffer prolonged system downtime. Take Email for example, the world seems to revolve around it, what if you can’t send or receive message for 2 days? (Try turning email off and see what effect it has!).
System failure is one thing, imagine if your business was unlucky enough to suffer some serious kind of office disaster or site outage, whether that be fire, flood or theft. Companies with offices based in more rural areas can still remember the concerns Foot & Mouth raised and whether they could actually get to their place of work. Are you completely confident that you could carry on trading or is it a case of fingers crossed?
Consider these facts*
· Only 26% of companies are comfortable that their disaster recovery and data protection procedures are resilient under threat
· 70% of companies go out of business after major data loss
· 60% of a company’s intellectual property is held within email systems
*Gartner
Terrorist activities over the past 10 years and particularly 9/11 have heightened awareness of how vulnerable businesses can be.
The potential for a real impact on your business is massive, so what’s the answer?
The first step is to review what plans you have in place already. You may have a Disaster Recovery or some kind of Business Continuity plan or you may perform tape backups of your data but that’s it. If you don’t or your plan is out of date, some relatively simple planning will produce real benefits.
The first step is to perform a Risk and Business Impact Analysis. These can be quite straightforward but produce massive benefits.
You end up with a comprehensive view of what the risks are and how they are being mitigated at the moment. The Business Impact Analysis helps define what systems and processes are really key to the organisation and their priority to the business.
Once this information has been agreed by the decision makers a plan can be written that puts in place an effective recovery plan to deal with everything from crisis communication to how you recover systems and data. There are many different solutions when it comes to looking after the lifeblood of your business – your data, from simple tape backup, online tape backup or using real time replication tools like Double Take Software.
Once the plan is written, you can work with an established and, preferably, independent Business Continuity provider and look at the solutions available that can provide the type and level of resilience you need.
Disaster Recovery – An Expensive luxury?
Has your business got a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan in place or do you see it as an expensive luxury? Few people would doubt the benefit of house insurance yet many businesses skimp on something that could help the business survive a major outage.
Sorry, the server’s down, can you call back later? Part 2
Having started your Business Continuity planning, two vital considerations should be how soon do you need to have your systems back up and running and how up to date does the recovered data need to be? These 2 factors will dictate what solutions you put in place as no business has an endless budget for Disaster Recovery.
