How would your business cope following a disaster?

When the term disaster is used it is associated with recent, highly publicised, events such as the London terror attacks and the Buncefield oil terminal explosion but the fact of the matter is that the disaster that affects a business's operations is usually more mundane such as theft or outtage of IT equipment, fire, flood and utility failures.

• 90 per cent of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to close within two years of the disaster.
• 80 per cent of businesses without a well-structured recovery plan are forced to close within 12 months of a flood or fire.
• 43 per cent of companies experiencing disasters never recover.
• 50 per cent of companies experiencing a prolonged computer outage will be forced to shut within five years

The statistics above should lead you to thinking about your business and how it would survive any such catastrophic event.

Even in the current economic cycle, investment in business continuity needs to be maintained as a disaster that could threaten your company's survival can strike at anytime.

What are your immediate steps?
How will you inform your staff?
How will you advise your customers and suppliers?
How will you recover your IT infrastructure?
How will you restore your systems data?
Where will you base your recovery from?

A good business continuity plan will contain answers to 90% of these questions, allowing you and your business continuity team to focus on the 10% of unexpected or undocumented situations that occur during an incident.  A successful business continuity plan will assist you from the start of any disaster to the full recovery of your business.

How IT.ally can help?

We can provide a range of services to suit the size of your business and your business continuity budget. We can assist in performing a business impact analysis which can then be used to generate a business continuity plan.  This plan can be used to formulate the requirements for recovering the business should an unforseeen event occur which threatens the business.

We are currently implementing a small business recovery platform designed to meet the needs of small business which can't afford the full suite of business continuity services.  This small business service utilises virtualisation to take a copy of your servers and then in the event of a disaster we can provide you with complete access to your applications and data through the internet.

How often to you test your recover plan?

IT.ally undertake between 7 and 10 full recovery tests per year. These tests include the full preparation of all test documentation, the recovery of identified systems and any recommendations identified.