Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

You plan Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery to deal with many scenarios, but real life always gives you something fresh to consider.

During a severe snap of cold weather, we had a server room in Edinburgh overheat.  Water expelled from the air con until it froze on meeting the outside air, which soon backed up to the unit itself and servers overheated on the coldest day of the year!

A solicitor client’s office block was left without electricity for three days when the incoming power lines were gnawed through causing a small fire four floors below.  The damage was limited, but the wheels of building safety roll slowly. 

Disasters can happen due to a cybersecurity breach, human error, hardware or software failure, or any number of causes.  When an incident occurs there are always a few moments of stress.  If you are well prepared, this will dissipate as you work through a pre-prepared checklist.  What do we do first?  When did we last check?  What are our critical target times?

The best call we ever make to a client is when we tell them the time of their last backup, the date of the last recovery test and when we expect to have each service functional.  Until that moment, the client does not know if they will have a viable business the next day.

Frozen air con units are rare, but cybersecurity exploits and human error find ways into our lives.  Every organisation needs a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan.  It is too straightforward and the consequences of getting this wrong are so great, that it does not bear thinking about.

Why Settle Technology can take you through the process.  We start with a Risk Assessment, draw up a Business Impact Analysis, propose Continuity and Disaster Recover plans, then test and update going forward.