Here’s a story that in a nutshell explains why every business should have an IT Continuity Plan.
A few months back we received a frantic call from a customer whose server it seemed had been damaged following severe flooding of the Comms room where it was located. He called us in a panic because he feared that his business critical files were lost forevever. His staff were sitting around idle so he worried about how much the the loss of productivity would cost him. Worst of all he had an important production deadline to meet for his most important client which he feared they would miss because of the inability to access business critical applications that were on the server.
Our client would have had every reason to be concerned – any business owner would, in the same position. However he had overlooked one small factor in the midst of his panic attack. As an EXCELLE Platinum Customer we had developed a business continuity plan (comes as standard) that would address such an incident to ensure that the customer would be back up and running in no time. Within 48hrs he had a new server in place, all business critical applications had been reinstalled and most importantly his vital business data had been successfully restored. Problem Solved!
If Disaster Strikes…what would happen to YOUR Business?
Will you have to send staff home while you wait for your IT guy to show? How many days will it take before your business is back up and running? 1 day? 3 days? How about 14 days? (we have seen this happen so don’t snigger! The customer here got so fed up of excuses from his IT Support company and called Supreme – we had him up and running in in two days). What happens if you lose all your data? For businesses that are data driven such as Recruitment Firms, Estate & Letting Agents, Solicitors and Accountants the loss of data could potentially prove fatal for the business.
Remember the first customer above – the customer with the flooding? This is how we got him back up and running in just 48hrs:
1. We had designed, agreed and tested an IT continuity strategy. Even before the ink was dry on the IT Support agreement, we had put in place an IT continuity plan. Remember we want all our customers to be a success so we try to foresee any potential threats to their success and tackle them from the outset.
2. The business’s continuity strategy included a backup and restore plan to deal with any potential loss of data . We installed a removable backup device which backed up daily and also took weekly offsite backups which were held in our data centre;
3. We keep copies of our clients servers at our data centre in Birmingham. This means in the event of a server failure we can quickly build the server using this coy
4. We had configured 4 laptops to act as “hot spares” each with its own broadband USB device which allowed the customer access to the internet where they could access their emails and some critical applications via the cloud.
Our Business Continuity plans will provide for:
• Email Continuity
• Online Backups
• Continuous Hardware Testing – you know the saying “Prevention is Better Than Cure”
• Disaster Recovery Drills (Dummy disaster recovery drills to test the effectiveness of the business continuity plans)
• Cloud Solutions to bypass down times (your desktops and applications hosted on an external server so you have access to them even when your systems are down)
Don’t leave running your business to chance. Be prepared for any eventuality. Give us a call now on 0800 001 5942 or email vip@supremesystems.co.uk for more info.
