Tag / dr

by Matt Seaton

Does your business have a data disaster recovery plan? Here’s why it is necessary

Is your business ready to handle a data disaster? If all your electronic documents and information are lost, how will your business survive?

25% of small businesses in the UK don’t have a data disaster recovery plan in place. 80% of businesses that went through an IT disaster failed within 18 months of their data loss event.

Data is fragile. If your business doesn’t have an IT disaster recovery plan already in place, it’s time to create one.

Understanding a data disaster plan and why your business needs one is very important. Read this handy guide and you’ll have all the detail you need to start the process of creating and integrating a suitable plan. You’ll then be well-equipped to find and work with a data centre partner that serves the needs of your business to the highest possible standard.

What is a data disaster recovery plan?

To be clear, this article does not cover business continuity planning. A data disaster recovery plan sets out a business’s workflow in the event of a disaster that wipes out electronic data, documents, and information. Wider business continuity plans put in place the processes that ensure the physical business can continue should a disaster occur.

The term disaster covers a multitude of potential events. Anything from terrorism to extreme weather and more can be included in this term.

Business stakeholders and investors expect data disaster plans to be in place so that in the event of the worst-case scenario, the business will not succumb to that data loss.

There are many different types of DR plan that your business can implement. These include prevention, detection, and correction plans. The best IT disaster plans naturally include elements of all three.

The prevention element of a plan aims to stop a disaster happening in the first place. Proper data storage, backups, and power protection are all part of the preventative approach. Outsourcing your data storage to top-quality data centers is a smart way to engage in proper disaster prevention.

Detection of imminent threats to your data is also highly important in avoiding a devastating loss. Routine system inspections should form part of any solid data DR plan.

Correcting data loss is an internal business function and should form part of any good plan. Investing in insurance against data loss will allow your business to correct any damage more quickly and completely. You’ll also need all key internal stakeholders involved in the data protection and recovery process to be ready for immediate action in the event of a data disaster.

Understanding these core elements of an IT disaster recovery plan will mean you’re in a good place to integrate such a plan to your operation. Having that plan in place ahead of a disaster, rather than scrambling to create one in the aftermath, is the smartest IT-related move you can make for your business.

Why does your business need an IT disaster recovery plan?

The threat of data loss is very real. Whether the threat is natural, environmental, or human, there are more and more instances of data loss in the UK every year.

Environmental disasters are less common in the UK than in some parts of the world. Outside of flooding, there’s a very low chance of a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or tornado wiping out your premises. A less severe environmental issue, such as a fire, will be more likely.

But in the UK, the biggest threat to your data comes from hacking. 88% of UK businesses have been subject to a cyber attack in the past year.

Dealing with the cost of losing your data and your business being unable to function as a result is a primary driver for implementing a recovery plan. If you lose your data and your business is unable to fulfil its responsibilities to its clients, it has the potential to cost a lot of money. The downtime your business experiences during a data loss event can also be highly damaging to your organisation’s reputation.

Chances are, you employ humans. Humans are wonderful creatures. But humans are also fallible. Your business needs a way to recover lost data quickly, because it’s all too likely that human error will, at some point, cause your business to lose data in one way or another. You can’t eliminate the possibility of a mistake, but a good data disaster recovery plan will help your business get back on track far sooner.

Hardware, much like humans, also isn’t perfect. Even without a natural or environmental incident, there’s a chance your hardware will simply fail. If your systems go down and you don’t have a recovery plan in place, it’s going to get expensive. You’ll have to replace or repair your machines, and you’re not going to have the data and documents you need to do your work.

What steps should you take to ensure your business can survive a data loss event?

Plan ahead. That’s the most critical component here. And that’s the point of a data disaster recovery plan.

Find a reputable data center that can assist with DR as standard. Talk to them about how your business can create a plan that’ll work properly for you in the event of a disaster. There’s a decent chance that your organisation won’t have adequate data recovery expertise in-house. Don’t try to do everything on your own, because you’ll likely need specific expertise and experience to make a plan that will work across the board.

There are steps your business can take to reduce the impact of any data disaster, even if you don’t have a recovery plan in place at present. These steps work no matter the size of your business, but are especially important for smaller businesses without dedicated IT departments or third party services.

Make sure you know your data. Work out which files and directories are crucial to the survival of your business. Assess your documents closely; you can assign a priority and importance score to the data your business produces / uses.

At the very least, you should have some form of data backup. Ideally, this backup will be offsite, in the cloud. But if for some reason you’re unable to do that, there should be regular internal backup functionality built into your workflows.

Make sure your business is ready for the worst

A data disaster will, at some point, impact your business. It’s simply a reality most businesses will have to face. The level of impact will depend on the quality of your data disaster recovery plan.

Creating and implementing a plan should be top of your to-do list.

Contact us today to learn more about data recovery plans, and how we can help you reduce downtime, reduce risk, and make sure your business recovers strongly in the wake of a data loss event.

by Matt Seaton

The benefits of workplace recovery for SMEs

We recently launched our new Workplace Recovery London brand, which now provides invaluable peace of mind to businesses in and around London from our on-site disaster recovery suite.

As part of the recent launch, we are helping SMEs to better understand the benefits of having such a service in place.

Workplace Recovery London

73% of small businesses admit to lacking a business continuity plan. And yet SMEs may struggle to recover if they’re hit with a disaster. Some never reopen at all.

This serves to highlight the importance small businesses should place in their own recovery plan.

Still not convinced? Below, we’ll take a look at the benefits of workplace recovery for a small business.

 

Prevent Lost Sales

The moment a crisis strikes your business, you begin to experience lost sales.

These losses only compound the longer the crisis continues. Lost sales become lost customers. Missed SLAs become financial penalties or lost contracts. After an extended outage, there’s a good chance you’ll need to pay extra to win back your customer base, too.

It’s rare that small businesses can take sustained losses like these. They often lack the financial safety nets of larger operations. A few weeks of lost revenue could ensure a small business will never recover.

Workplace recovery restores your services at the first possible opportunity. That way, you can begin making up for your lost revenue immediately. A good business continuity plan is one of the few things that will carry your business through a major disaster.

 

Customer Continuity

A workplace recovery plan can measure its success by whether your customers notice any disruption.

With the right recovery service in place, you can transition into backup services without your customers even spotting the difference. As we mentioned before, customers are more likely to abandon a service when there’s a break in continuity.

Investing in workplace recovery increases your chances of retaining your customers by preventing a hit to the customer experience.

This is especially vital for any businesses offering ongoing support. If your services go down, your customers could end up losing money themselves. In a worst-case scenario, your service outage could even pose a risk to customer well-being.

 

Staff Continuity

You also have your workforce to think about when you’re hit by a disaster.

If your staff are on flexible contracts, they’ll be unable to earn a living while you’re out of business. If you’re out for long enough, they’ll need to move on to other employment to cover their living costs.

But you need to consider permanent staff, too. Each day your company is out of action is another day you’re paying wages and benefits without RoI to your company. That’s yet another financial hit on top of the others we’ve covered.

Workplace recovery services can bring your premises back online to ensure continuity for staff. Where that’s not practical, they can help establish temporary operations centres.

Notifying your staff of an incident becomes much easier when vital services are in place. If you can bring your business back online even in a limited way, you can prepare your workforce for any disruption to their schedule.

 

Respond Efficiently

Humans in an emergency situation have a tendency to make poor decisions.

It’s not a universal trait, though. Most notably, those who know there’s a plan to follow can perform much better in a crisis situation. That’s why it’s so important to have a process in place for a major service outage.

A strong workplace recovery service fields a team of experts who know how to respond to disaster situations. They’ll follow a pre-planned set of actions to ensure your business continuity.

A business faces the prospect of huge financial losses when there’s a break in business continuity. They can’t afford to waste time figuring out what to do next. Fast, decisive action is the only way to limit the damage.

A recovery service will also work with you to come up with a preemptive plan. That way, you can rest assured that a plan is in place no matter what happens.

 

Maintain Your Brand

The general public understands that one-off incidents are largely unavoidable. But a prolonged issue suggest a deeper cause.

If you lack a recovery plan when an incident hits, you send a clear message. The message says you’re an amateur brand. It’s not nice, but it’s a fact. And these days, that’s likely to see you mocked on social media.

The hit to your reputation is yet another way you stand to suffer massive financial losses without a recovery plan. As your customers spread the word, they’ll drive away new custom.

Unless you have a masterful PR team, negative media coverage will only destroy the reputation you’ve built for your brand.

But with a good recovery plan, you’ll actually get to show off your competence. It’ll impress your customers if you pull off providing your service even in the event of a disaster – it might be the only British instinct stronger than the urge to banter.

 

Peace of Mind

Running a small business already demands a lot of hat-wearing. Without the luxury of dedicated teams, employees at a smaller company often have no choice but to juggle multiple tasks.

The last thing you want to add to the daily concerns of running a business is the fear that it could all end at a moment’s notice. Yet a single fire or flood could wipe out everything you’ve built.

Hiring a workplace recovery service puts your business continuity in the hands of experts.

That frees you up to spend mental energy on your business instead. It also makes each investment in your business less of a gamble, as you’re less likely to lose everything overnight.

Small-business owners often undervalue peace of mind. Yet peace of mind is what stops work overtaking your life. With a business continuity plan in place, you’re free to focus on your core business without distraction.

 

Workplace Recovery is Serious Business

Running a small business doesn’t mean you have to think like one. You’re vulnerable to many of the same factors that can hit a larger business. Yet your position can rarely take the hit in the same way. Consider workplace recovery services if you plan to take your business seriously.

Looking for more disaster recovery information? Be sure to get in touch with our team.

by Matt Seaton

Business continuity in the face of terrorism

Disaster Recovery Suite

When business owners think of disaster recovery, more often than not they focus in on the most likely threats; flooding, fires, power cuts, and other common infrastructural issues.

Terrorism is often cited as an outside consideration for business continuity. After all, if you look at the raw statistics, it is a very unlikely occurrence. But when the UK endures three horrendous attacks in as many months, this is a topic that clearly deserves more attention.

The atrocities committed in London Bridge on Saturday 3rd June will be solemnly remembered for a long time here at Netwise, as will the awful attacks in Manchester and Westminster. The London Bridge attack hits particularly close to home for us, given our relatively close proximity to the area, and our regular use of Borough Market and the surrounding pubs for lunchtime meetings with our team.

Outside of the devastating loss of life, attacks such as the one in London Bridge really do serve to highlight the clear importance of reliable disaster recovery services for businesses up and down the country.

The knock-on effect of this economic impact is not likely a conscious consideration of the cowardly perpetrators, though it is a very real post-event consideration which adds dramatically to the gravity of their actions.

While many businesses are now fully on-board with the idea of outsourcing mission critical IT infrastructure to highly-resilient data centres, the physical side of business continuity is still an area often overlooked.

 

The knock-on effect

Failing to properly plan for an eventuality such as this can be devastating to any business. To further compound this, it also increases the effectiveness of the disruption and damage set in motion during the attack.

Outside of the horrific impact an attack like this has locally in the days following such an event, the ripple effect can be felt for much longer, with a far wider sphere of influence. Of course, this includes the economic impact caused through the disruption of business in the area.

The security cordon area in London Bridge and Borough Market contained hundreds of businesses, all of whom had limited or no access to their premises during this time. This cordon lasted several days – enough to cause serious disruption to businesses in the area.

We live in a time whereby these kind of considerations need to be taken seriously by all business owners. If action can be taken to lessen the impact of an event entirely out of your control, then it stands to reason that this is something that must be of critical importance.

 

Disaster recovery as a proactive counter-terrorism measure

London and the UK are clearly major global targets for this kind of terrorist activity, which is something we must work to combat on both a macro and micro level. Protecting your business against any loss of revenue incurred as a result of an event like this is to directly combat the impact this will have on the UK economy – no matter how small that contribution may be.

Having a business continuity plan in place, both for digital and physical operations, can be considered an effective, proactive counter-terrorist measure; one which any business can contribute towards.

To protect your business against the threat of a terror attack is perhaps the most valuable of all the DR advantages; particularly when operating in a major city. Not only does it present clear benefits to your own organisation, it also helps limit the damaging shock-wave effect an attack of this nature will have on the wider area.

Being able to carry on with ‘business as usual’ in the face of an atrocity such as the one felt in London Bridge is absolutely vital in minimising the social and economic impact this type of event will otherwise set in motion.

Naturally, this is a far cry from quenching the true source of the problem, but it is a proactive action that can be taken by organisations in dealing with the fallout from something as awful as a terror attack in a major UK city.

 

Disaster recovery for SMEs

Fully-featured business continuity planning has been a mainstay of banks and governments for decades, with private replica offices on standby for emergency use should something like this unfold. Likewise, larger corporations have also joined the physical DR revolution over the past ten years, making use of big-scale shared operations run by major serviced office operators here in the UK.

This service exclusivity has slowly been eroded over the past few years, with a number of operators (ourselves included) now delivering physical business continuity services for SMEs.

Long gone are the days of thousand-desk commits with the major DR service providers. We operate a dedicated Disaster Recovery Suite which can service single desks right through to entire run-of-suite operations, opening up this concept of protection to anyone and everyone.

Businesses of all shapes and sizes mould the economic landscape of the UK. It is commonplace for smaller, specialist organisations to be servicing some very large and important contracts, which puts extreme pressure on service and operational reliability, no matter what is happening outside. As such, it is no longer acceptable for any business to incur avoidable downtime, with DR services available at a per-desk level on a monthly service plan.

 

It is never too late to be thinking about your business continuity plan, and how this will safeguard your operations against any physical threat – acts of terror included.

Remember: good DR services should be close to your existing premises – for ease of use during an issue – but well outside of any hot-zones that would be considered a likely target for terrorist activities. Our London Central facility falls into this category; we are located in a quiet but easily accessible area between London Bridge and Bermondsey.

Learn more about our fully-serviced London disaster recovery suite.

by Matt Seaton

The importance of business continuity

The concept of business continuity is nothing new. In fact, you probably already partake in a range of business activities that help protect your enterprise from localised issues, even if you’re largely unaware of it.

Office 365, for example, is one way in which modern businesses are mitigating the risks associated with running critical applications locally, which usually place full reliance on in-house systems with single points of failure.

A great deal of businesses — both small and large — are now moving more completely into the current era of technological separation, pushing their mission-critical IT infrastructure away from the office, into highly resilient data centres whereby systems enjoy access to the very best in connectivity, power and cooling.

This is all well and good, but it does leave one fundamental area of business operations open to serious problems should a localised issue occur; the physical premises.

Most businesses still overlook the potentially catastrophic effect a major disaster could have on their working environment, and in the fast-paced economy of today, this is no longer acceptable to customers and end-users at any level.

DR Suite

 

Disaster recovery services

Essentially, physical DR services are a safety blanket designed to offer piece of mind through access to standby working spaces.

If a fire, flood or other similarly damaging problem causes your usual place of work to be unreachable or unusable, you can switch operations to your standby business continuity suite. If planned and implemented correctly, this can often be a transparent process to your clients, which is vital in maintaining quality of service.

This was once a service set enjoyed exclusively by large-scale operations, such as banks and governments, who would build replica offices for their own private use.

Over the past decade or so, access to these kinds of services have filtered down to mid-sized enterprises, with a number of operators offering large office spaces for reservation to multiple tenants, without the need to self-build. This still requires a large commitment in terms of square footage, which tends to limit use to enterprises of significant size; certainly out of reach for those businesses with smaller requirements.

It’s only in the past few years that this has entered into the realm of accessibility for smaller organisations.

 

Small-scale DR services

Small (or even micro) organisations often require nothing more than a handful of desks. This can still be a struggle to find, as many major suppliers of such services still have a minimum commit of at least 25 desks.

Smaller businesses also need turnkey DR services, with nothing more than a monthly subscription fee providing direct access to fully services workstations in the event of an emergency. Unlike larger enterprises, building out a space to specification internally is rarely an option.

DR Suite

 

Turnkey disaster recovery services

We offer access to a fully serviced 33-desk disaster recovery suite, with availability from single desks upwards.

Our high-specification DR suite is accessible around the clock, with a private meeting space and reception area to bolster emergency operations.

With the space being on-site at our world-class data centre facility, users of our DR services also enjoy access to our blue-ribbon site amenities, which include a customer kitchen, customer lounge, showers and secure storage spaces.

Additionally, provided you also use our facility for your colocation requirements, you will be on-site with your mission-critical IT infrastructure, providing enhanced end-to-end business continuity capabilities.

This unified approach to the concept of disaster recovery brings the full range of outsourced high-availability services under one roof, making for a fantastically simple one-stop-shop for both technical and physical business continuity planning.

If you’d like to speak with us about how this space can work for you, or to book a tour, please do get in touch.