In the technology sector, we witness hundreds of unfortunate situations resulting in outcomes that can cripple an organization.
We know how important it is in business survival to have the right plans and solutions in place.
Nonetheless, we still hope we’ll never actually have to execute on a full business disaster recovery plan. Statistics tell us over half of businesses will permanently shut down as a result of a significant data loss related to a natural disaster.
On the
night of March 13, that all changed. The flash floods resulted in rising water that penetrated our building at JMark Business Solutions Inc.
While it’s impossible for a plan to be perfect, we can speak from firsthand experience that a very thorough plan is mandatory for any organization to have a chance in being able to operate in an emergency situation.
In our circumstance, we executed our plan at 9:07 p.m. and continued taking calls and supporting our clients. We didn’t miss a single call or service request.
Here are four aspects to plan to survive the storm.
1. Communications. Beyond having a robust and documented plan – ours is 172 pages and growing – the primary catalyst to a business recovery plan is communication. This includes having primary and alternate phone numbers, primary and secondary email addresses, emergency contacts and specific roles for everyone.
Getting communications to your customers and vendors is also very important. In all circumstances, make sure you are transparent. If you are going to be down, be honest about the status of services or products. Provide updates as appropriate throughout the process to ensure there are no misperceptions about what is going on. The last thing you want are rumors driving perceptions.
2. Off-site resources. Off-site resources are mandatory for both the technological and interpersonal aspects of a successful recovery.
In JMark’s situation, we leverage an off-site data center to house many of our primary systems and connectivity. If you must operate 24/7, utilizing a data center with redundancies is a requirement. If you can tolerate a moderate amount of down time, off-site backups may be sufficient. However, your plan must include arrangements for your recovery mechanisms. This may include a standby system at a secondary location or the means to restore servers and workstations in a temporary cloud or secondary facility.
3. Team and culture. One of the most important mantras at JMark is, “people first, technology second.” I can’t emphasis enough the significance of having the right team and culture to deal with adversity.
Training around the plan is required for it to be successful. Taking the time to share the details of the plan with the appropriate people is the only way it has value.
4. Technology planning. Identifying the key components of technology, specific to your organization, and determining the available means of sustainability, recovery and the priority for each application is one of the fundamental portions of a healthy plan. Each of the applications used to run the organization should be prioritized and evaluated for the necessary uptime or recovery time.
For example, the order processing system and a Voice over Internet Protocol phone system would be critical, but in most circumstances a system that only does accounts payable can be offline for a day or two. The priority management list will determine how to design the technology solution and in what order to recover each component.
Cloud solutions have dominated technology news recently. Many of these solutions actually have been around for years. However, in the last few years the cloud-enabling technology has matured, and the cost of communications have become much more reasonable. As such, almost all organizations can now justify the expense associated with an off-site solution of some type.
Whether that is a secondary office, a redundant cloud-based solution or fully operating from a data center, there is an option available to all organizations.
Taking the time to evaluate your entire infrastructure and prioritize, deploy and test the technical design is the only way to ensure that your organization doesn’t end up on the wrong side of business success rates.
The reality is 60 percent of businesses don’t have a documented disaster recovery plan and 40 percent with plans actually failed in the recovery process, according to the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council’s 2014 annual report.
There obviously are many more items that should be considered and discussed for a business recovery plan to be complete. I hope you never have to deal with a disaster, but if you do, I hope you have a comprehensive plan to follow.
Thomas Douglas is president and CEO of Springfield-based JMark Business Solutions Inc. He can be reached at tdouglas@jmark.com.
