Don’t let a disaster ruin your day
The phrase “disaster recovery” conjures up earthquakes, fires and collapsing buildings. But a disaster can be as simple as a burst water pipe flooding a server room, a power cut, or your IT provider going bust.
Four questions to answer
A DR plan doesn’t need to be complicated and it doesn’t need to be expensive or time consuming to prepare.
There are 4 questions to answer in your plan:
- How will you continue to service customers?
- How will you bill your customers and get cash in?
- How will you order and pay for essential supplies?
- How will you pay your employees?
For each question, think about how you would do these things if your computer systems were unavailable for a day, 2 days, a week, or longer.
The level of detail depends on how quick and smooth you need your recovery to be. You need enough detail and enough planning that you can handle a disaster and it won’t sink your business.
Plan? What plan…
Importantly a DR plan must be “rehearsed” on a regular basis to check that the right people are familiar with it, and that it can actually work. A rehearsal can be a full company 5 day exercise, or it might just be a 2 hour annual refresher for key people. But it does mean getting the plan out of the drawer, dusting it down and working through what would happen in practice.
Find out more
We meet businesses, struck by disaster, on the verge of collapse. We also meet businesses who just want a bit of help with some planning to ensure they’re confident if the worst ever happens… If you’d like to talk to us about disaster planning then please get in touch.