Tom Johnson

A Disaster Recovery Plan - (pt.4)



Posted: Wednesday, February 09, 2011

by Tom Johnson
Business Computers & Service

Concluding our series on Disaster Recovery, as a business owner, you need to ask … what constitutes a disaster to my company? You have to define a disaster in the context of your business. Would you consider it a disaster if a single component, something as small as a barcode printer for example, quits operating? Is it a production killer if your customer database is inaccessible for a day? Maybe you can limp along without these functions for a while, until they can be repaired on a non-emergency basis. Perhaps though, you need all aspects of your network fully operational at all times, 24/7. The level of your need will determine how comprehensive your disaster recovery plan will be, as well as the costs to maintain the plan.

As I discussed previously, the minimum disaster recovery program that any business, and for that matter any individual, must have is to perform backups on a regular schedule. As an extra measure, the data and applications storage facility should be geographically distant from the business location. It is the first line of defense in recovering from a system crash or network outage. The more sophisticated the network and the more dependent upon that data a business is, determines the level and cost justification of a recovery plan.

A disaster recovery plan is like an insurance policy for your business. You know the need to be insured from flood, fire and theft; you need to be insured against systems failures. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan will get you back to work, whether that plan is to have a replacement barcode printer on hand or the plan calls for complete implementation of a systems and application restart coupled with downloads of the entire database. A disaster recovery plan is an investment in your business.

The simplest Disaster Recovery Plan is to have a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a reputable Managed Service Provider (MSP). It is cost effective, especially in terms of time saved by you and your staff, allowing you to focus on what you do best … building a profitable enterprise.

As part of a service agreement with a Managed Service Provider such as BCS / CallProcessing, monitoring software is installed on your network. A business owner can be assured that hardware and software are functioning at optimum level, and that all is in compliance. 24/7 remote monitoring will highlight problems that can be readily addressed before a disastrous and costly system failure occurs.
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