Disaster Recovery – can you afford not to?

In today’s transaction-intensive world, companies that can tolerate data loss between the time of their last backup and the time of a disaster are getting increasingly hard to find.

System outages are both unpredictable and in many cases unavoidable, with serious consequences on the ability to do business. Any downtime (whether planned or unplanned) can cause major disruption to a company or even bring it to a grinding halt.

According to the Contingency Planning Research and Strategic Research Corporation, 43% of Companies experiencing disasters never re-open, and 29%close within 2 years.

The risk of fire, flood, theft and system failures make disaster recovery a critical part of business planning. Downtime costs money, and most of us would cease to function without our IT systems and data.

David Taylor, managing director of Amshire IT solutions is keen to ensure that business is aware of the consequences and offers some advice: “Disaster Recovery Planning is a lot like taking out an insurance policy, you don’t recognise its value until you need it.

“It’s the ‘what if’ factor. How much would a disruption really cost you, not only in £’s but downtime too? Can you really afford to be without Services for any length of time? Have you planned what you would do? Would you lose data if your Server failed? How would your Customer / Client enquiries be answered?

“Planning for a disaster should be an integral part of any business strategy”.

As part of business planning David suggests it would be advisable to check options with your IT service provider: “There are some easy solutions that can form part of your contract with your IT partner:

• Will you have the loan of a Server?
• How quickly will your business be up and running?
  I would suggest around 2 hours whilst your Server is repaired and/or replaced.
• Can your system be transferred back to the repaired or replacement server with no disruption?
• What security measures are in place to protect your data from theft?
• Is security in place to maintain your system integrity and no risk is presented via viruses, spyware, hacking or incorrect access to any of your data?

David continues: “It is important to create a fully tested and regularly updated Disaster Recovery Solution to ensure your business recovers quickly for any Disaster and/or Emergency. Ensure that critical assets are categorised, prioritising their protection and assessing their vulnerability and provide access to data and voice in the event of a disruption to your normal business operations”.

As a guide, it is recommended that software is loaded onto the server to take a copy and store it onto a separate machine and backed-up every 15 minutes.