Member Article

Protecting your profits when disaster strikes: the importance of a business continuity plan

Disaster recovery is just one element of business continuity you should be considering to help protect your profits when disaster strikes, according to Perfect Image’s Oliver Plumpton. Here, he explains the difference between the two terms and how you can help yourself by putting an effective plan in place to minimise downtime, should the worst happen to your systems.

You may have heard the term bandied around – business continuity – but what does it actually mean? Many people confuse this term for another – disaster recovery – when the two, while related, are totally separate things.

Business continuity is a set of planning and preparation procedures. They’re designed to ensure that an organisation’s critical business functions will continue to operate as normal (or be returned to normal as quickly as possible) despite a serious incident or disaster, that without the plans being in place, would have ground the organisation to a halt.

Disaster recovery on the other hand (and as the name suggests), is all about regaining or obtaining access to resources, and getting back lost or inaccessible data. Of course, it could be through a serious incident or disaster that causes the data to become lost, and this is often where the confusion between the terms business continuity and disaster recovery are – disaster recovery is simply one part of a business continuity plan.

As a business leader, if you think business continuity and disaster recovery is only about making sure you have a backup system in place, think again. Having a proper form of backup solution is certainly important, but there are many other IT elements that you need to consider as part of your business continuity plan to ensure, should the worst happen, you’re back up and running as quickly as possible and with little damage to your operations (and profits!).

The fact is having an effective business continuity plan in place is essential for most – if not all – organisations. The first step to creating a proper business continuity plan is to determine how long you can afford each part of your business to be out of action for and what the costs and consequences of any disasters might be.

The answers to these questions should then inform the strategy for your plan and allow for any new IT products or procedures to be implemented across your business. Then test, test, test! It’s no good having a plan in place that is supposed to work, finding that when disaster strikes, your systems fail and you’re stuck. One of the most common mistakes made with business continuity initiatives is to put systems in place, but then fail to test and manage them properly on an ongoing basis. It’s not that you don’t know it needs doing, it’s just it never gets to the top of your to-do list – make this a priority!

The thing to remember is the cost and effort involved in implementing these plans need to be fit for purpose while relevant to your business needs. At Perfect Image, we work with our clients in a consultative manner to determine what is important to you and which areas of your business operations are most sensitive to downtime. In that way, we can plan, implement, test and manage the right solution for your individual needs that will best protect your business in the event of the worst happening.

Recently, we started working with ArcServe, a data recovery and back-up software solution provider. Like all vendors we work with, we choose to offer these products to our customers because they fit with the services we offer; we listen to what our customers want and need, and then use our expertise to create a solution that delivers real business benefits.

We understand that a business continuity plan and associated back-up and recovery solutions can be expensive and overly complex. One of the beauties of ArcServe for data recovery as part of your business continuity plan is that is allows our team at Perfect Image to deliver a unified data protection solution that covers all tasks, whilst cutting complexity and cost.

And another benefit of ArcServe is that it can be implemented across a number of different IT infrastructures. Whether your IT solutions are set up on premise, in a true cloud environment or taking a hybrid approach, through our relationship with ArcServe, we can offer our customers a truly flexible business continuity solution that works best for their business.

For more information about business continuity and Perfect Image, visit: http://www.perfect-image.co.uk/managed-services-support/business-continuity.asp

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Perfect Image .