Floods and freak snow in February – What can Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery teach you?

Whether it’s unexpected flooding or flurries of snow, the one thing that you can never predict in the UK is the weather. Whilst you might not be able to predict it, when it comes to ensuring your business keeps afloat, you need to plan for it. Your plan needs to cover your operations including your premises, your supply, and your colleagues (all with your customer firmly in mind). Our Disaster Recovery Guide can help you do this.

First of all, you’ve got to understand what your attitude to risk and then you need to create a strategy to manage it. You’ll need to decide between avoiding the risk, reducing it, transferring that risk, or accepting it. We can’t avoid uncharacteristically hot spells in March, and we likewise can’t predict monsoon rains, so these are eventualities that we have to accept, and risks that we can’t guard against.

Then we arrive at reducing the risk of harm to our business through planning and preparation, and guarding against the potential loss our businesses might encounter. In this context, that means investing in a disaster recovery plan that takes into account your own unique RTO/RPO requirements that suits the needs of your business and your customers.

What does your Disaster Recover plan contain? Do you have any procedures around how to restore your systems after an outage? The most important parts of your DR plan are undoubtedly:

1. Your staff – This should be your highest priority with a clear focus on keeping your employees safe, informed and prepared. For example, if your office had to close, do your staff have access to laptops and other hardware to keep your business functioning?
2. Your equipment – Is all of your equipment and hardware accounted for and even covered under your policies? On top of that, you should be periodically checking the health of your equipment to make sure that it’s not the cause for either a data or non-data disaster within your business.
3. Your business data – What would happen to your business if you lost data due to a power outage, system failure, virus or cyber-attack? Using a data centre and shifting your operating systems to a cloud server not only effectively provides a back-up for your business, but also reduces your RTO/RPO, their vulnerability to a complete loss of data can be reduced. You can’t underestimate the importance of your IT department. By work with your IT professionals and keeping them engaged and informed of your disaster recovery plan, you maximise your RPO and keep on top of your RTO.

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If people are the first line against a disastrous spell for your business, they need to be fully invested in your business to help it recover. That means fostering innovation throughout your business, from your IT department, to your front-line staff, and making senior management appreciate the value in business continuity and disaster recovery measures.

We know how to help your staff work anywhere, work together, and work securely. To help understand your own disaster recovery approach, or for help maximizing your business resilience - Download our disaster recovery guide here, or get in touch on 0330 332 7933