Be Prepared For Any Eventuality

Here’s a story that in a nutshell explains why every business should have a Business Continuity Plan.

We had a call a few months back from a customer whose server had been damaged after the server room where it was stored had been flooded. He called us in a panic because he feared that his files were lost forevever; his staff were sitting around idle and he worried about how much the the loss of productivity would cost him. Worst of all he had heard horror stories about companies who had suffered the same fate and one of them was no longer in business!

Our client would have had every reason to be concerned except for one small factor which he had overlooked in the midst of his panic attack. As an EXCELLE Platinum Customer we had developed a business continuity plan that would address such an incident to ensure that the customer would be back up and running in no time. Within 24hrs his systems were back in place and his data had been restored. Problem Solved!

What would happen to your business if this happened to you? Will you have to send staff home while you wait for your IT guy to show? How many days will it take before your business is back up and running? 1 day? 3 days? How about 14 days? (we have seen this happen so don’t snigger! The customer here got so fed up of excuses from his IT Support company and called Supreme – we had him up and running in just 48hrs). What happens if you lose all your data? For businesses that are data driven such as Recruitment Firms, Estate & Letting Agents, Solicitors and Accountants losing their data would be the kiss of death for the business.

Remember the first customer above – the customer with the flooding? This is how we got him back up and running in just 24hrs:

1. We had designed, agreed and tested a business continuity strategy. Even before the ink was dry on the IT Support agreement, we had put in place a business continuity plan. Remember we want all our customers to be a success so we try to foresee any potential threats to their success and tackle them from the outset.

2. The business’s continuity strategy included a backup and restore plan to deal with any potential loss of data . We installed a removable backup device which backed up daily and also took weekly offsite backups which were held in our data centre;

3. We held an offsite server (a server hot spare) on behalf of this client as a backup in case such an incident occured which had been already configured with the business’s network settings;

4. We had configured 4 laptops to act as “hot spares” each with its own broadband USB device which allowed the customer access to the internet.

Once we received the distress call from the customer, a senior technician was despatched with the preconfigured server. It took the engineer one hour to get everyone working again (we received the initial call at 9.35am on Monday morning by 11.30am staff were back working). The bulk of the work was reloading the data that had been lost and testing to ensure that all the data had been recovered. By 9am the next morning, the business was working as if it had never experienced an outtage at all. Job Done!

Our Business Continuity plans will provide for:

 

• Email Continuity

 

• Online Backups

 

• Continuos Hardware Testing – you know the saying “Prevention is Better Than Cure”

 

• Disaster Recovery Drills (Dummy disaster recovery drills to test the effectiveness of the business continuity plans)

 

• Cloud Solutions to bypass down times (your desktops and applications hosted on an external server so you have access to them even when your systems are down)

 

Don’t leave running your business to chance. Be prepared for any eventuality.

About the Author

Angela Hart is Client Services Manager at Supreme Systems.

Supreme Systems is an IT Support Company based in Birmingham, West Midlands. We provide IT Support, IT Services, Computer Support, Computer Services for businesses in Birmingham and throughout the West Midlands.

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