Disaster Recovery

Do you remember the Buncefield explosion, the floods around Swindon, the attacks in London? We all remember these big events which make national headlines. And if you worked anywhere near them you already know how much disruption a disaster can cause.

But not every disaster is big enough to make the national news. What if your electricity is cut off for three days due to engineering works, the water mains for a couple of days, or you had a break-in and your computers were stolen? All these are potentially disastrous events.

Anything that could prevent you from continuing normal day-to-day operations is an event that must be planned for, and action taken to mitigate it’s impact on your business.

Can I Ignore Disaster Recovery?

Many businesses fail to plan for the consequences of a disaster situation and assume that recovery will be quick. But it will take time to replace your inventory if it is lost in a fire, move telephone lines to a new location, replace computers that are stolen or destroyed, or recover data if a hard disc drive fails for example.

Ignoring disaster recovery planning can lead to:

• Loss of operational and IT data;
• Loss of customers and business;
• Loss of key staff;
• Inability to function;
• Loss of a product or service to sell;
• Loss of credibility;
• Panic amongst customers, suppliers and staff; and
• Financial losses.

If you lose your business data, no matter whether this is kept in manual or electronic form, then the probability (over 80%) is that you will go bust within three years. It doesn’t matter how big or small the organisation, planning for a disaster is essential and will drastically increase your chances of survival should the situation arise.

So the answer therefore is a definitive NO.

And that’s where we come in.

Disaster Recovery – What do I need to think about?

Disaster Recovery is the planned performance of key steps to facilitate the recovery of your organisation’s systems (including IT) due to a serious disruption.

Many people think of Disaster Recovery as something that affects only their IT systems. Whilst this is one factor to consider, you need to plan for disruptions at all levels of your business. For example what would you do if the phones were cut-off for a few days? What if a fire destroyed your inventory?

Insurance can mitigate the cost of recovery, but without a disaster recovery plan that gets you back up and running, preferably before your customers notice, you could still go under. Indeed, 80% of businesses who don’t have a plan fail within 13 months of suffering a disaster.

Depending on the nature of your business, good disaster recovery is achieved by designing a process which enables your operations to continue to work, perhaps from a different location; with different equipment; or from home; making full use of technology to achieve a near seamless transition that is all but invisible to your customers and suppliers.

Management must ensure that recovery from any incident is fast with minimal disruption. But in today’s climate, at the same time any plan needs to be at the minimum cost that will achieve the desired goals effectively.

How Can We Help?

Taking various statistics conservatively, at least two out of every five business, no matter what size they are, go out of business if they experience a disaster within 3 – 5 years.

With our help and careful planning this need not happen to you.

Our consultants can help you with all aspects of developing and testing your plan. We look at your entire business and assess where your vulnerabilities lie and work with you develop the methods to mitigate them. Because we are a sister company of Turnbull Associates and Myers Clark we have extensive experience of knowing where and why businesses of all types fail and what should have been done to prevent it.

But we also understand that any plan developed has to be affordable within the overall context of the business . No plan, however embellished can completely prevent disruption to business that has suffered a disaster, so we help you to work out the most cost effective solutions for the risks you are prepared to take.

When you come to implement your plan we have a variety of services we can offer:

SAGE 50 hosting and services

If you use SAGE 50 for invoicing, purchasing, payroll and accounting we can provide you with an instant hosted service you can access from any computer with an internet connection. So provided you and your staff have access to a computer system you can carry on sending out bills, paying suppliers and staff and chasing payments without interruption.

If a disaster prevents you from doing this work yourself, we can also carry out essential billing, payment of bills and staff and all necessary book-keeping up to Financial Director level for you using fully qualified accountancy staff from our sister company Turnbull Associates.

Online Back-up

Keeping your business data backed-up is the first step in any form of business continuity planning. Without back-ups your entire business will grind to a halt from even the smallest hardware or software failure. Every piece of data you rely on in the running of your business needs to be backed-up at least once a day – more often for critical data.

We encrypt and back-up all your data to secure servers which are administered and guarded 24/7, then we back that data up again – to military-standard hardened systems. Should you need it back it a simple process of reloading it back onto your computers.

If your computers are not available we can provide you with a virtual computer network that can be accessed from any internet-enabled computer.

Business Continuity Centres

For the highest degree of assurance we can provide through our partner organisations access to business continuity centres that are fully configured with servers, workstations, phones, fax machines, copiers, and everything else you need to keep running – from meeting rooms, to kitchen facilities.

Ship-to-Site and Mobile IT Recovery

If you are able to keep working at your own premises we can provide complete standby systems pre-configured to your own specifications, along with the technical support to install it and get you back up and running in the shortest possible time.

If your premises are not accessible but you still want to continue working from your site, we can ship a complete mobile business continuity centre complete with 20 workstations, a separate plant room and disabled access.