What Is Business Continuity ?
It is the ability for your organisation to run its operations as normal wen you have a systems failure, disaster or interruption.
It is your ability to use your backup and disaster recovery plans and you know they work !
Do you have a Plan for Business Continuity?
In 2011, in Australia, we have just seen what I called the “Summer of Sorrow”. Businesses have been interrupted because of Qld Cyclones, Qld and Victorian Floods, NZ Earthquakes, Japanese Earthquakes and Tsunamis. We have had customers affected inone way or the other by most of these events.
We even heard of secure data centres in Brisbane bringing entire websites down because they couldn’t get fuel deliveries for their power generators.
However, Business Continuity can be affected by more every-day events such as :
What will you do WHEN any of these events occur in your business? What plans do you have for WHEN one of these events happen to you?
Most Small and Medium Sized (SME) businesses do not usually have the time to think about these issues. OR….. they trust that someone else has this under control…..
What plans do you have if your email server stops working for a few hours or more?
Do you have a backup email server service in place?
“My server is only 3 years old – it cost a lot of money and it’s under warranty.. If it’s new – it shouldn’t break down…”
The reality is the most important asset of your business is the data not the hardware. Recent reports have estimated that data is worth 10 times the value of the hardware it sits on.
“Besides , I think my IT guy has set up and is doing backups……..”
When did you last test your backups. If you had failure right this minute, your backup would not include all of your data would it?
Just last month , we helped a 30-user client who had a new high-end tape backup drive installed 18 months ago. The Office Manager had diligently been swapping tapes offsite on a daily basis all that time.
Guess what ?
When we performed one of our free audits for them, there was no data on the tape at all!
In fact, the tape drive was incompatible with their server hardware and wasn’t even connected!
Are your backups working?
We believe that all businesses should think about these issues and put in plans to overcome them.
What are you doing about these issues?
Sensible Business Solutions has developed a Sensible Recovery System which will help your dramatically reduce the impact of any Business Interruption or failure.
In Part 2, we will further explore one of the techniques that you probably have in place right now and the weaknesses that you should keep in mind.
Email Kevin Spanner: info@sensible.com.au
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