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Posted on: 22 March 2022
Author: Karen Rogers
Here at Corbel Solutions- Ipswich IT support experts, we believe that a sign of great leadership in your business is to make sure you have a business continuity plan.
One that includes an IT disaster recovery plan that is fully tested.
Your business faces all manner of threats that could potentially disrupt the day to day running of your key services. A tested DR plan can help address them.
Small to Medium business in Ipswich, Felixstowe and Bury St Edmunds need to ensure that they can carry on business as usual when a crisis strikes. A pre prepared and tested disaster recovery plan will get you ahead of the game and prepares you for the worst-case scenario.
There are some essential benefits that DR planning can bring to your business and this article will explain why it is so important and how you would go about creating a plan for your business.
Why do I need a plan?
A business continuity plan details out a repeat process that your business should take to nullify and recover from differing threats including cyber security and IT Disaster Recovery. It will help protect your business assets and your team during a disaster, allowing your business to function.
A plan would be established as part of your overall risk strategy and would be created ahead of time- not in the middle of a disaster. Your plan would provide a clear path of how to proceed in the event of a disaster, what the likely impact will be to your operations and, how, by implementing defined procedures it will mitigate them.
A secondary advantage to having a predefined plan is to ensure that your team can continue to access your systems. It informs how your team, and your IT Support Company, can reach critical applications and services. A good plan alongside IT Support solutions can defend against financial loss, dented reputation, and productivity.
What specific threats should businesses in the Ipswich area protect themselves from?
- Utility Outages
Loss of communication lines, power or even water can impede your business especially if these outages are for a long time. Without clear DR planning, this risk to your productivity is high.
- Cyber Security
With over 50% of businesses being impacted by the Cyber Threat in 2021 and 2022. It is when, not if, your business will be impacted by the increasing Cyber Security threat. Some of the most common examples include Ransomware attacks, denial of service and in some instances data theft.
- Natural Disasters
Just like a pandemic, natural disasters are an extreme environmental phenomena that includes fire, floods, and tsunamis. They are very hard to predict but when they occur they can be extremely disruptive to your business and supply chain.
- Pandemics
Pandemics can affect your business in so many ways as we have all found out over the last couple of years. It can result in a reducing demand for some business and an increasing demand for others. A plan helps you define how your team will communicate and if need be, carry on your business remotely.
- IT Failure
Whether a small or a large failure you will want to be clear on what your recovery objective and plan is before this failure starts to impact your business.
As part of your IT Strategy, work with your local IT Experts and understand how your backup systems can be recovered with minimal disruption covering cloud telephony, on-premises server infrastructure and any services you are running in Public Cloud’s such as Microsoft Azure Solutions.
What should the ideal plan include?
Developing a plan requires a logical approach and you may want to engage with a third party such as your local IT Support Company. Here’s what your strategy should include-
- Goal Identification
A disaster not only affects your IT Systems, but it also incorporates all your business functions such as operations, PR, and human resources.
Every company, whether you are in Ipswich, Felixstowe or Bury St Edmunds, will require DR planning. This will be unique to your business, so your plan is specific to you.
- Setting up an Emergency Team
Choose a cross section of your management team and anyone else who can help contribute such as your IT Service Provider. Appoint a leader and ensure everyone is clear that they are in charge should disaster strike.
- Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis
Identify and analyse your personalised potential threats. Discuss them with your team and identify what would happen if you needed to modify or reduce services.
Document as you go – this will prover invaluable.
- Customer Service
In a lot of instances, your clients will need to be informed during your disaster and it is imperative that your customer service team understand your plan and the communication points throughout the incident.
- Business Function
Your plan should include critical business function and should include business risk, impact on employees, customers, community partners, and external organisations such as your IT Support and Services partner. This is vital to ensure business operations are back to normal ASAP.
- Plan Updates and Staff Training
Your stakeholders should be fully aware of your plan and a proactive approach should be adopted to trial runs to verify that the plan works. This will allow you to pinpoint improvements or missing elements and enable your team to make the whole process smoother.
This enables you to build your own plan and gives customer confidence that your plan is effective and will protect you from small and large disasters and ultimately mitigate on financial loss.
Don’t let the Disaster Cripple your Business
A disaster could be the ultimate test of your leadership. That’s why creating an in-depth plan before the disaster arises is key. Ensure your team are on the same page and you’ll be able to come out stronger after any situation.
If you need some assistance into pulling together your DR planning, please get in touch with Corbel as your local IT Support company in Ipswich, we can set-up an initial chat to determine your goals and how to achieve them. Corbel, based in Ipswich, are IT Support Experts and offer managed IT Support and Disaster Recovery solutions including Cloud disaster recovery for small and medium businesses.
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