What Do You Do When Your IT Fails?

Many companies would simply stop working without access to their mainline business applications, so it is surprising to find that many companies' backup procedures fail to address best practices for contingency and business continuity planning.  As a business owner you need to plan for contingencies such as IT failure, fire and flood, and there are a number of sensible backup procedures that you should consider implementing to protect against IT failure and give yourself the best chance of keeping the wheels turning when disaster strikes:

Data Backup

Every company needs a plan for data backup, and in fact most companies do at least something. We often find however that these plans can be very simple, and often just comprise taking a backup of the server to a backup drive or tape.

Offsite Backup is a must!

Unless you have offsite backup of your company data, you are not protected against real emergencies such as fire or flood, where both a company’s main server and the backup drive can be destroyed. Given that loss of your data through fire is effectively your worst nightmare, surely every company should be backing up their business critical data (i.e. that which is needed to get you up and running again) to cloud storage to protect against this eventuality. Whilst many people still have legitimate concerns over data security in the cloud, there are a number of suppliers that provide affordable encrypted online backup which will protect your confidential data and ensure that you can recover your business data swiftly in the event that disaster strikes.

Don’t Rely On Manual Methods

We also still find companies where offsite backup is a manual process. While any offsite backup is better than none, do you really want to run the risk that lightning strikes when the person who performs data backup for you is on holiday? Given that there is little or no premium to be paid for automated offsite backup software, we strongly advocate that you should remove the element of chance and automate the entire process.

Don’t forget laptops and mobile devices

The great thing with laptops and tablets is that you can work on the move and carry your work round with you wherever you go, but unless you do something about it, that information is not going to be backed up anywhere in the event that your laptop is stolen, lost or the hard disk fails. There are some very neat solutions to address this issue now, some of which are built into standard data backup solutions, and others which provide cloud backup / synchronisation as part of a cloud storage service that allows you to share information across desktop PC’s laptops and tablet devices. You will need to take into consideration the way that your employees work in selecting the right solution for your company, but backup for laptops and mobile devices should be considered if you want to avoid the wringing of hands (not to mention data recovery costs) when your laptop hard disk fails taking with it the business plan that you have been working on for next week’s meeting with your bank manager!

Plan For Resilience When Moving To The Cloud

Cloud computing adoption is now moving swiftly ahead. Apart from email, many companies are starting to move business applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to cloud based services. If industry experts are correct, we will all be buying our business software on subscription from a cloud supplier within the next 5 years.

The benefits of cloud computing are clear. You gain access to all of the software that you need to run your business without having to invest in expensive servers, or the technical expertise to install and maintain them. Furthermore social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus are becoming part of everyday marketing and customer service activity. Yet the more we become reliant on the Internet to run our businesses, the more disruption we suffer when technology fails leaving us disconnected from our customers and business information.

Keeping The Internet Running

Fortunately, firewalls, routers and the links that connect us to the Internet are fairly reliable. Nonetheless, given the potential loss of productivity that businesses are likely to suffer in the event of the loss of Internet service, it makes sense to make provision for backup.

Firewall Resilience

The majority of business class firewalls such as those provided by SonicWall can be configured as a high availability pair such that a secondary unit automatically takes over in the event of failure of the primary firewall. The software and configuration of the secondary firewall needs to be identical to the primary unit, but manufacturers provide concessionary pricing so that the cost of firewall resilience is affordable.

Internet Link Resilience

Many firewalls will include the provision to automatically switch over to a second line in the event that your primary Internet link fails. Nonetheless, you need to be careful to ensure that your backup Internet link enters your offices through a different route to your primary link. It wouldn’t be the first time that a company’s primary link fails only to find out that their backup Internet link enters the building using the same cable route that has just been dug up by the gas board! To avoid this issue, there are two options:

• If you can live with a reduced service for a few hours that will provide you with limited browsing together with the ability to access email, a 3G or 4G cellular connection  can be connected to the firewall for use when the primary link fails.

• If you need better performance, a 2 MB satellite link can provide the backup Internet connection with only minimal degradation of service.

The problem with building resilience into your IT systems is working out where to stop. Should you install resilient hard disk configurations, mirrored servers, or do you simply outsource the problem of system resilience to a cloud provider? As a business owner, you will need to weigh the likelihood of a failure of a server, network component or internet link against the impact to your business and the cost of incorporating different levels of resilience, although we would be pleased to advise anyone who needs some help in these areas. 

The points raised above are simply a starting point, but if they help you to formulate a Business Continuity strategy that will help you to sleep a little easier, I will have done what I set out to do.

If you would like to discuss your needs for Computer Support or Business Continuity Planning, please call on 01707 255060, or email us at info@clearview.co.uk. We would be delighted to help.