Rockford Blog

­Safeguarding your business with Disaster Recovery Planning­

Recent events, from poor travelling conditions to flu pandemics, have reinforced the need for companies to take action in protecting themselves against potentially severe after effects of a disaster. Other events such as fire, flood, computer malfunctions and information security disasters could all have a substantial effect from which a company may never recover.

In July 2007 over 7,500 businesses in the Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire area were affected by the floods, with many subsequently losing out on business and with unrecoverable damage for some of the smaller companies*. A company losing as little as a few days of downtime and business can ultimately impact it’s long term growth and profitability.

With this in mind it is vital for companies to implement a DR (Disaster Recovery) plan to ensure such disasters do not have a catastrophic effect on their business. The advice given by managed IT service provider, Rockford IT, and other business consultants and IT providers, is to have a clear, thorough and well tested DR strategy. This way if the worst should happen most businesses could recover their business critical systems, even as soon as the next day. Following on from this, even with the best DR plan in place, Rockford IT’s strong advice is to have well designed and documented systems that will be affected as little as possible by disasters and the unexpected, as well as assisting greatly with recovery times.

When planning Disaster Recovery strategies, companies must cover scenarios and objectives should a disaster occur. These include recovery time objectives, how much data and what data (if any) the company is prepared to lose, the maximum amount of time the business will survive from initial service interruption, as well as a description of key roles and responsibilities.

Once a business has clear objectives within their DR plan, procedures must be adhered to in order to ensure the DR plan would work. Actions such as storing data and servers securely in an external, fire and flood protected environment, implementing an efficient backup solution for data (and testing it regularly), and having the ability to redirect email to an alternative site, will all help to keep a business protected should the worst happen.

Remote connections can be set up simply and securely should employees need to work from home in the event that they cannot access the office. This ensures that the company does not suffer from stretched resources and a significant loss in productivity and business.

Companies should also bear in mind to not only cater for the typical physical disasters such as fire or flood, but also virus outbreaks, theft and data loss. The use of efficient firewalls and implementing a security conscious culture among all employees will help protect from outside and internal threats.

*Association of British Insurers (ABI) (2007).

Rockford IT Special Offer – Rockford IT are currently offering a free of charge, no obligations DR assessment of your companies IT infrastructure, to analyse costs and time implications should a disaster occur, and ensuring a business can prepare for any eventuality (including data backups and the prevention of disasters through network vulnerability assessments). For more information contact us at info@rockford-uk.com or call 0333 101 6000.