Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Advice

Few companies would currently conduct business without contingencies covering system failures, anything from data backup at an individual employee level through to complex automated disaster recovery systems covering data, personnel, business systems and telecommunications.

It's very easy to become complacent when everything is running smoothly and even more so when problems occur, given the immediate preoccupations. Business continuity needs careful planning and with a huge array of possible disaster scenarios, complacency will most likely result in considerable financial losses and inconvenience down the line. Doubtless at a time when your business can ill afford disruption.

Disaster Recovery Planning Earthquakes, floods, fire, hurricanes, civil unrest, terrorism, vandalism, sabotage, hacking, viruses, denial of service attacks, staff error, system failure, software glitches, network downtime and intranet breakdown can all lead to business emergency and downtime. Without your critical business systems immediately recoverable, or covered by a suitable disaster recovery plan, your company will face downtime and loss of both business and reputation. Business impact needs to be assessed for each area of your infrastructure. Before developing an effective business continuity plan your company will need to prioritize systems and allocate budgets appropriately. This is a complex process and involves a thorough understanding of the risks and consequences to business. Risk is an aspect of DR that can be loosely quantified using a numerical risk analysis scaling system and can be an effective DR tool when assessing company exposure to disaster and emergency scenarios.

Once developed, a recovery plan must be maintained, tested and audited to ensure it remains effective and appropriate for the changing needs of your business. Staff need to be trained in all aspects of the DR plan to ensure proper procedures are maintained during the recovery period whilst maintaining good customer service.

Service Level Agreements

Clients will have service level agreements (SLA) in place with your company and these need to be adhered to if penalties are to be avoided and dissatisfaction develop. Without an suitable level of backup for critical business systems you run the risk of falling below agreed service levels and whereas clients may forgive short outages, lengthy or repetitious downtime often results in disgruntled clients taking their business elsewhere and sullying your reputation.

Business-Continuity-Disaster-Recovery is an information site offering useful advice on DR and providing appropriate resources and recommendations with an emphasis on communications failures and phone system backup. The Telecom Directory includes useful recovery and telecoms resources. For a complete business continuity service for telecoms from dial-in information noticeboards to comprehensive backups of your in-house phone systems we can recommend UK based company 999Alert.

For consultancy on alert notification and disaster recovery contact the sales team at X-on, providers of hosted telephony and DR solutions.

Telecoms Recovery is as important an area when evaluating business continuity as data backup and should be included in any DR planning. Downtime in business communications can be very costly and an effective way to maintain communications between staff and customers should be in place to cover emergencies.