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September 26th, 2007 [by Doug Alder]
If you own a business there are at least two plans you must complete if you want that business to be successful, and to last. The first is your business plan, which lays out your product(s), your expected market, your risks, and your projected costs and revenues. Without such a plan your chances of success are slim and your chances of attracting financing are none. The second plan you should have in place is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP).A BCP is needed so that your business can recover and continue operations in the event of a disaster, be it natural or man made. Consider what happened on 9/11 when the twin towers went down. Those towers contained a lot of businesses in the financial services sector (banks, brokerages, insurance companies) and in some cases they were able to restart operations in a very short time because they had a well thought out plan. In other cases they simply went out of business or suffered a sever impact on their business because they didn’t because key people and data were lost and they had no plan in place for dealing with that.
All of the above and many more are factors that can severely affect your business’ ability to carry on.Marsh Canada (company provides risk and insurance services, investment management and consulting services) recently did a survey of Fortune 1000 companies in regards top risk assessment and planning. The results are quite interesting as you can see in this graph
(click on image for a larger image)Risk assessment for the purpose of business continuity must, as you see, take into account a lot of factors many of which are beyond your ability to control and many you probably haven’t considered.One of the things you can control, however, is your IT recovery strategy. When Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast in August 2005 many companies were caught unprepared. Many had their electronic data stored locally and lost all of it. Other companies not located in the gulf region had their data backed up to servers in that region and they too suffered as the power went out and they could not back up their data anymore. Some are still trying to recover from that. Planning to manage all emergencies is essential for business continuity.Here are a few links to help you with continuity planning:
One of the key factors for any Internet enabled business is how to safeguard its data. Key to that is a well thought out data backup plan. The first thing to remember in this strategy is to back up to a separate location and choose that location well. Wherever it is, it should be safe from natural disasters and, unfortunately these days, potential terrorist activity.Choose your data center well is a key operative concept. Where you place your backups, and your servers if you are outsourcing your infrastructure, is of critical importance. Is you data center subject to brownouts or blackouts? Does it sit in a hurricane zone? Is it located on the west coast inside the San Andreas fault zone? If you answered yes to any of those you should reconsider where you have your data located. When disaster strikes you need to be able to start your business again, if not seamlessly then as quickly as possible. You can’t wait on your data center to recover so that you can recover.Also key is the type of backups you do. Do them often and choose a company that has an Enterprise class backup system, such as Tivoli Storage Manager from IBM, as anything else is playing dice with your company’s data. RackForce now offers Tivoli Storage Manager.RackForce operates Tier 3 data centers in Kelowna BC, Canada that are secure from the natural disasters and their consequences as mentioned above. If you are interested in making this, and/or remotely hosted servers, part of your Business Continuity Plan please contact our sales staff and we will be glad to discuss your needs with you.