Micro Tech News
Disaster Recovery - Are you prepared if something should happen to your business?
November 22, 2008
Shortly after a hurricane, a friend tried to contact his vendor to purchase several computers but could not reach them. There was no answer when he called and their website was down. He shrugged and said he liked that company but would have to look elsewhere. Along with their many problems to overcome, that company has just lost a customer.
I assume with all of the problems confronting them no one thought to forward their phone number or move their website. Both of these could be done quickly and would allow for communications with their customers. If a their company had a disaster plan, no one had been assigned those tasks. When a customer has information about the condition of the company, they are more likely to be patient.
We always hope that disaster will not strike, but that doesn't excuse not being prepared for it. Remember all it takes is a broken water pipe over the servers to ruin them. I doubt that the broken water pipe would be in the news. The longer a company can't do business the harder the recovery will be. Few companies can afford to be out of business for more than a week. Communicating the situation to customers is crucial.
A full business continuity plan is complicated. It includes identifying and prioritizing all business processes. It requires defining responsibilities and authority for emergency response as well as procedures for insuring the welfare of employees, communicating with the public and moving operations if necessary.
Not every company can afford to develop a full plan but a small amount of effort focused on information technology can reduce downtime significantly. Someone should be assigned the task of regularly cataloging all servers, backup systems and mission critical software. Backups of critical data should be made often and a copy should be kept off-site. In a Windows environment, an ASR will allow for faster recovery if new hardware is needed.
As the recovery begins, every hitch in the plan costs time. If a particular piece of hardware is not immediately available it can cost hours or days. Periodically test the process to ensure that all areas have been addressed. Restore data from the backups and test the data corruption. It will do no good to have a well executed plan only to find that the data cannot be read from the backup tape.
The statistics say that the chances of a disaster are small, allowing us to justify a low priority to business continuity planning. But if disaster does strike, having a plan will save precious time that could make all the difference in saving the business. |
