Are You Prepared For The Storm?

Wet, cold and depressing. The British weather during the last few months has been enough to make anyone feel miserable. But when the associated flooding puts the precious contents of your home or business at risk, feeling miserable can suddenly turn to feeling inconsolable.

The recent floods across large parts of Britain have shown the dangers of not having a well-honed insurance plan in place. In business terms, such insurance comes in the form of a business continuity plan - the ability of the organisation to recover from the loss of a business critical function which may even encompass a complete site.

Not all disasters involve flooding, clearly. Power failures occur and workers can also delete data, either mistakenly or maliciously. But the recent floods should provide an alarm call to check what plans you have and how they would work if disaster struck.

How quickly could your business recover from a disaster? Can you honestly say that you know who is responsible for every element of the recovery strategy? If you are unsure, then it is time to start investing in your disaster recovery plans.

An increasing number of IT managers are thankfully beginning to realise that it is an essential requirement, with researcher Forrester suggesting 24 per cent of large firms and 15 per cent of small firms believing disaster recovery is now a top priority.

Not all is well, however. Forrester also suggests that non-IT executives - particularly in the case of small firms - place a lower priority on disaster recovery than the IT department; after all it is the IT department that would face the immediate pain.

Your job will be to convince the rest of the business that a proactive response to adversity could avoid problems occurring in the first place. Only by involving your business colleagues, will you be able to understand what's really important to the organisation and how you can help mitigate business risk. The first step is education: good practice helps iron out bad practice. People across the organisation need to understand the issues and consequences and then understand what steps can be taken.

Assessing preparedness for disaster recovery is essential, too. Brush the dust off the filing cabinet and check out contracts with your service providers. There is a high probability that even if you are covered for some form of disaster, you are not ready for all eventualities. Check the small print and ensure suppliers will provide recovery services when they are required, rather than as an expensive add-on. Then test your plans alongside suppliers at agreed points, such as once a year. Include executives from all business departments and ensure all parties and partners act to fix underlying problems.

Most importantly, as part of your disaster recovery policy, think carefully about what types of strategies should be put in place to protect your business-critical information and ensure data backup is as easy as possible. Traditional systems backup data to tape, with specialist software providing automated protection that can help protect information across a variety of operating systems.

Although tape will remain crucial for long-term archiving and disaster recovery needs, as faster disk backup becomes increasingly popular, suppliers will develop a range of techniques across online media to aid quick and effective recovery. Imaging solutions, for example, allow the IT manager to identify, locate and restore specific files rather than a lengthy restoration of directories. Snapshot replication, on the other hand, copies the database as it exists at a single point in time. Companies can keep snapshots online and create multiple recovery points.

Other users looking for more regular updates are turning to continuous data protection software - technology that automatically updates backup files on a regular basis.

It's likely that more and more IT managers will use a mix of backup technologies to deal with disaster recovery. It is important that you fully understand the options that are available to you and put in place the right solutions. In many cases this does not have to be a significant investment.

If you are concerned about the impact that an unexpected rainy day could have on your business, we can help. b2Lateral work with a range of vendors who offer business continuity solutions. We can help you evaluate the options available to you, advise on best practice and develop and test that essential business continuity plan. Call Derrick Hall on 0844 664 2565 to find out more or email Derrick at dhall@b2lateral.net