Business Disaster Recovery Advice - Part 1

Local specialist business continuity providers Flexsys UK based in Heywood offer local businesses the following advice:

Imagine if your business was unlucky enough to suffer some serious kind of office disaster or site outage, whether that be fire, flood or theft. Are you completely confident that you could carry on trading or is it a case of fingers crossed?

Consider these facts:

• Only 26% of companies are comfortable that their disaster recovery and data protection procedures are resilient under threat.
• 70% of companies go out of business after major data loss.
• 60% of a company’s intellectual property is held within email systems.

Terrorist activities over the past 10 years have heightened awareness of how vulnerable businesses can be.

The potential for a real impact on your business is massive, so what’s the answer?

The first step is to review what plans you have in place already. You may have a Disaster Recovery or some kind of Business Continuity plan or you may perform tape backups of your data but that’s it. If you don’t or your plan is out of date, some relatively simple planning will produce real benefits.

The first step is to perform a Risk and Business Impact Analysis. These can be quite straightforward but produce massive benefits.

You end up with a comprehensive view of what the risks are and how they are being mitigated at the moment. The Business Impact Analysis helps define what systems and processes are really key to the organisation and their priority to the business.

Once this information has been agreed by the decision makers a plan can be written that puts in place an effective recovery plan to deal with everything from crisis communication to how your recover systems and data.

Once the plan is written, you can work with an established and, preferably, independent Business Continuity provider and look at the solutions available that can provide the type and level of resilience you need.