Every business needs a disaster recovery strategy, and it must rehearse its ‘worst case scenarios’. Increasingly, businesses are reliant on their IT systems to be up and running all the time.
Despite the best will in the world, backups cannot save you if your infrastructure goes offline unexpectedly, because they will not prevent an outage. The idea of disaster recovery planning is to prepare for system downtime in the first place.
The Cost of Inaction
Many small businesses assume that their systems will never go offline. This might be down to naivety, or it could simply be a consequence of a relatively reliable system. Naturally, as a business grows and changes, it increases the amount of data it holds. Its systems become more complex, and a failure becomes more of a risk.
Think about your typical working day. Which services could you truly function without? Would you be able to carry on working if your email went down? What about your CRM, your website, or your SharePoint site?
Even more importantly, what is the financial impact of any one service going down?
When a system goes offline, a business may not be able to carry on taking orders. That’s one financial impact. Then, you might have to factor in the cost of overtime to make up for the shortfall, or the time involved to recover from a hacking attempt. If your emails are bouncing, or your website isn’t taking orders, the cost implications can be massive.
Planning and Transforming
To avoid downtime, you need a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that will prevent this cost and risk. That means putting together a strategy, implementing the right technology to support it, and rehearsing your plan before a real outage occurs.
The last point – rehearsal – is important. You can plan for disaster comprehensively, but until you actually simulate it, you won’t know your strategy is effective. That can leave you back to square one, with no plan B to fall back on, and with your business reputation in tatters.
How WellData Helps
WellData believes in a Fix Before Fail approach to IT support. From the moment we take over monitoring and management, we seek to contain the potential effects of a disaster. We audit systems, keep them up to date, and create continuity plans that allow us to replicate your systems.
For example, if you have a critical database, we’ll manage the primary instance and monitor it proactively. If a disaster occurs, we’ll bring a secondary instance online to keep the business functioning.
The ultimate goal is to keep your downtime to less than an hour, and ideally, far less than that. When you have a robust plan in place, you have more breathing room during a disaster, since you know the business can function while you clean up the mess.
Fixed Fee Outsourcing
During business as usual, or a disaster situation, WellData clients benefit from fixed fee services. We never add unexpected costs or penalties if your systems go offline unexpectedly. For more information about our disaster recovery planning and outsourced IT management, get in touch with our team today.
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