Anybody who’s heard this knows how annoying 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 probability of you calling them again ?
The most frustrating point of all is that this doesn’t have to be the case. There is no reason for any business to suffer prolonged server downtime . Take Email for example, the world seems to revolve around it, what if you can’t send or receive emails for 2 days? (Try turning email off and see what effect it has!).
System failure is one thing, imagine if your business enterprise 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 office . Are you totally 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.
Terrorism over the past 10 years and particularly 9/11 have heightened consciousness of how vulnerable firms can be.
The potential for a real impact on your company livelihood 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 Continuence  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 If you don’t or your plan is out of date, some relatively straightforward planning will gain real benefits.
The first step is to perform a Risk and Business Impact Analysis. These can be quite straightforward but produce  incredible  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 organization 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 disaster recovery  plan to deal with everything from crisis communication to how you recover applications  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.
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Tags: fingers, local bank, tape backups, probability, email systems <BR/>
“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.”
NO ! You need the practitioner’s expertise from the beginning – BEFORE commencing the Business Impact/Risk Analysis. I recommend working closely with the practitioner to develop an understanding of the process, but creating a “plan” and then asking a practitioner to make recommendations to make it work is a waste of money (since the plan very likely will be incomplete).