Please help, I've lost my laptop!

Picture the scene its 9am on Wednesday morning and Phil from accounts calls to tell you he’s left his laptop on the 7.35am train to Marylebone.

Not only are you a laptop down but Phil (and everyone else in the office for that matter) store their files on their computers.

This is a disaster! Yes, yes it is. Disaster Recovery isn’t about a major incident, its more about an event or a series of events that prevent your business from functioning.

As a business it is vital that you have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan, in layman’s terms; a plan that ensures that your business can continue to function in the event of a disaster, whether that disaster goes by the name CryptoLocker, Hurricane Katrina or Phil.

Putting together a plan with specific steps will make sure that your business can recover quickly from a disaster with minimum disruption to you, your staff and your clients.

IT Equipment and Infrastructure

Aside from Phil having lost all of his files he’s also a laptop down. Putting together an inventory of your IT equipment, servers and printers, including make, model and suppliers means that should your office flood or suffer fire damage you can easily replace the equipment. Just don’t store the inventory locally.

Your data is the life blood of your business and it is irreplaceable. It is so important that you back it up. This could be to the cloud , virtual servers or at a very basic level on a data stick that you take home every night.

Guidance and Procedures

If you decide to have a Disaster Recovery plan in-house, plan for how you are going to deal with a disaster.

Inform your team of what you are doing and why. If needed write new policies covering data storage and back-ups.

TEST IT! Don’t wait until you have a disaster to test whether your plan works.

Make It Someone Else’s Problem

You can do just that and it is by far the least stressful solution IT companies offer Disaster Recovery packages for all types of businesses. Any IT company worth their salt will conduct a risk assessment with you. At a very basic level they will want to meet with the senior members of your company and decide how quickly each department needs which systems up and running and plan with you how that will happen.

You may also wish to look at and plan for the possibility of an ‘internal disaster’ occurring such as a disgruntled employee looking to sabotage the company or an innocent employee opening a dodgy email which goes on to infect all your IT systems, or maybe you to have a Phil.

Whatever you decide to do, do it! Hopefully you will never need to use your DR plan and like your home insurance you will wonder why you pay it year on year, but if in the event of a disaster you will be glad you did.

Collaborative IT offer a range of DR solutions so if you do fancy making it our problem we’d be happy to talk to you.