There should be no question about it; businesses must plan for the worst. After all, life is unpredictable and you never know what is around the corner. The fact is disasters are inevitable, they creep up on you when you least expect it. If you aren't prepared they can cause havoc as well as consuming time and money trying to get the business back on track when all this could have been prevented with a simple disaster recovery plan.
Sorry if this is sounding morbid, but the fact is too many businesses forget protecting the backbone of their success. Having spent years creating a reputation and brand image, why would you chance risking it all down the drain because you were not prepared enough? You can plead ignorance, but what use is that? You can learn from your mistake, but why wait to make the mistake when there is an easy answer to preventing losing possibly decades of building up your enterprise and social standing?
Your customers are the key to your success. They have chosen you because they have faith and trust in your service. Don’t let them down. Don’t ruin your reputation. Don’t be remembered for the business that was affected by a disaster.
To emphasize the last point, it is common knowledge that society remembers and discusses a crisis more than a successful event. In Professor Baumeister’s article in 2001, ‘Bad Is Stronger Than Good,’ he highlights the point that research has proved time and time again that bad emotions and bad feedback have more impact than good ones. Negative impressions and negative stereotypes are formed more quickly and are more resistant to dis-confirmation than positive ones.
So to reiterate my point, businesses should have a disaster recovery plan in place and I am going to share the key steps you need to take to be confident your disaster recovery plan will protect your business in the likelihood of any disaster occurring.
1. Create a team
Select employees who will form your contingency planning team. This should be based on those individuals who will bring a variety of perspectives on the company’s vulnerabilities to the table. Consider representatives from all the departments within your business, including HR, facilities and high-level managers.
2. List all names and contact details
Create a list of all employees’ names with all methods of communication for each employee and ensure that this is kept regularly updated. Communication should include personal and work email, work mobile, personal mobile, home number, pager, and the list will go on. The more ways you have to keep in touch should disaster strike, the better.
3. Determine a chain of command
A clear chain of command and authority needs to be considered to determine who is in charge when the key personnel are missing. This enables employees to understand who to take direction from in the chaos that frequently follows a disaster.
4. Risk assessment
Make a checklist taking all sorts of possible scenarios into account about anything that could go wrong. You should then consider how each one of those situations would affect your core business, your revenue streams, your customer service and your employees.
5. Plan B
Find solutions to all the possible scenarios that may occur. If you couldn’t access your primary base of operations for an extended period of time you need to sort out a Plan B so you'll be prepared...
- If certain parts of your business shut down or were destroyed, how would you stay solvent?
- Can your employees work from home?
- Is there another company that would share their facilities with you temporarily until you can rent or buy space at a new location?
Based on your company needs, determine what is needed to keep the business running if disaster strikes...
- Where would revenue come from?
- What people, equipment, space, supplies, or services do you need to keep that revenue flowing if you experience a business disruption?
Consider investing in system migration software to enable you to migrate your systems to a location away from the disaster so that you can continue business as usual. One product I would highly recommend is CloneManager™ which has been developed using its own transport mechanism and web services to provide optimal and fast transfers of data from source to target machines. An added advantage is that it allows system migration to and from different physical, virtual or Cloud environments. Even if you have a network with a restricted bandwidth, clones can be performed quickly and reliably with this software.
6. Invest in BMR software
Data loss can have a huge impact on your business and data backup is a key aspect of business continuity and a disaster recovery plan. Bare Machine Recovery (BMR) provides a complete backup solution, assisting in the rapid recovery of servers to a pre-disaster state. Cristie Software’s BMR solutions can recover data in less than 10 minutes and enables you to schedule regular, full and incremental backups which can then rapidly recover your systems to an identical server state, even to dissimilar hardware. Make sure your business has a reliable backup plan with Cristie BMR solutions. To find out more click here.
7. Test, Test and Test again!
All of the effort you put into backing up your data can be for nothing if you are not capturing the information properly.
So you can have the best backup system and a top-notch disaster recovery plan, but if you do not run a regular drill to make sure it all works, it may not work when you need it to! Then you will be no better off than the survivors combing through wreckage and thumbing through the yellow pages for the contact number of the nearest data-recovery specialist.
Therefore, invest in the Recovery Simulator software add-on that is currently available on the market, to ensure that your BMR solution works. Run these tests regularly so that you can be confident your systems are secure from any disaster or crisis evolving.
So there you have it: the seven steps you need to take for business continuity and system security to keep you armed and ready for any future crisis attacks!
For more information regarding data backup, recovery and system migration speak to one of the experts:
Free phone: +44 1453 847000
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Email: sales@cristie.com
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