I want you to imagine you have just lost your office, your desktops, your servers, your filling cabinets and your phone. You are standing at home with a single backup tape and a cell phone – what do you do?
This is at the extreme end of business interruptions, but several businesses in New Zealand will experience this every year and many more will experience a major incident. It is worth planning because if you know you can survive, you can cope with anything. Sadly, many businesses do not survive such dramatic situations and preparation is the key to making it out the other side.
Having a backup in a different location to the original data is a great start. However, getting useful access to that data is a whole other question. The average deployment time for a new server is measured in weeks, which is not too long for most businesses.
Reaching a high level of business continuity for a medium-sized office should be easy. Most people have a functional computer and a great broadband connection at home. If you work at home, this should be a tested solution and you need to figure out how to grant critical people access to work from their homes.
The phone system may take some time, but most people have mobiles and numbers that can be diverted. Another cheap backup plan to consider is Skype; all you need is a few headsets and everyone can call from their home computers. But what about remote network access? You have the data on tape, but can you get a server and where would you put it? Unfortunately, your broadband connection at home is just not going to work; it will be too slow for your homebound colleagues to access the server.
There are innovative solutions available; there are technologies that offer the ability to restore servers into the cloud and in the event of a disaster. Rather than maintain paying for a spare server, you can pay a small insurance fee that provides you with the right access capacity in an emergency.
Web Drive is testing a solution with online backup specialists Data Lock to restore backups directly onto the virtualised server from within the same data centre. This saves you having to transfer your tape or other media, and is expected to cut the recovery time down by hours and potentially save a whole business day.
Whatever your plan, the most important thing you can do is test it. Most plans will fail on the first run. It is just impossible to think of everything without trying it first. You do not want to be trialling it when the crisis is happening, only to find that the critical system has not been backed up and you do not have a record of those passwords.
Most companies do not test because it is too expensive or too much work. I challenge you now to break this mindset. Get proactive and pick a Saturday, or your business’s quietest day, plan your outage and simply power down all of your systems. Restore all your critical systems on a spare server for a trial over the weekend. Then get your team to login from home and see what they can do. Run some dummy invoices, process some orders and access your client database to see if you receive email and other continuity services.
If you do not know how you would do it in practice, then that should be a pretty strong signal that you need to do some planning. Finally, if your IT person is saying it is a “piece of cake” then you just need to ask one question: “If I turn the power off to the office and do not let you back in there, can you get everything working again?". If they say yes, then you say “let's do it”. I can almost guarantee it will go wrong the first time, and that is the point.
Business continuity plans do not need to be complicated and expensive. Once you have run your test and had some real experience of how to cope, you will find it easier to simply build your systems in a more resilient way from the start. Giving your business the best chance of survival should not be something that interrupts your business.
