Business Bounces Back

Business resilience is a term that covers the ability of a company to bounce back after a crisis, be it from fire, theft or a malicious software attack. The speed at which you can bounce back and the level you can bounce back to, is critical.

A recent survey published by the Department of Trade and Industry (produced with Pricewaterhouse Coopers) found that only 20% of companies have a disaster recovery plan, and only 8% have tested that plan thoroughly. The survey also found that two thirds of UK businesses suffered a premeditated or malicious incident involving loss of data in the past year, but only 32% of organisations in the UK take back-ups of their data away to a secure location. However, backing up is only half of the solution. Most companies also compete in the global marketplace and, as such, need 24-hour access to their data.

This creates a paradoxical problem for IT Managers: more data must be backed up but the time in which this can be done is shrinking rapidly. IT budgets have become stretched as businesses strive to increase profitability and gain competitive advantage. IT Managers need to ”do more with less”, which makes it imperative that they streamline processes and maximise benefits wherever possible.

Physical Security

The first line of defence is to make your location safe, so all servers should be protected by surge protectors with an uninterruptible power service (UPS) that gives you enough time to close down your server without loss of data – preferably a UPS that emails you if the power spikes, or shuts off. The server should also be protected from theft in a secure server room or a locked, ventilated cabinet. Protection against fire and water damage can be costly and it’s often better and cheaper to have an identical server in another location.

Reliable Servers

The second line of defence is to invest in a server that is reliable and robust and is fault tolerant, or has a level of redundancy built-in. The most obvious example of this is the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) hard drive. You can configure a RAID system at a basic level with two (or more) drives, one making a copy of the other, so should one fail the other takes over immediately, and the redundant drive can then be swapped out for a new drive.

Online Back-up

Online back-up, to a second – or third location is the optimal solution. It’s automatic and runs 24-hours a day, so all you need to do is tell the software where to look for data to back-up. It’s more expensive than an offline back-up device like tape, as you pay by the megabyte – although the data is compressed before being stored and you pay only for the compressed data. The main advantage is data is automatically transferred to a remote location that is normally protected from water, fire and theft and that it can be restored at any time from anywhere in the world with a web connection.

Back-up Hardware

While on-site back-ups are not ideal they are cheaper and if you’re conscientious enough to take the tapes or disks off-site then they’re just as effective as online storage. Offline data storage solutions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes; from secondary drives that plug into a USB port on the server, to tape drives that sit in a spare drive bay within the server, through to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices that plug into the network. NAS devices are fast, have the advantage of being simple to use and install, and usually have large capacities that allow everyone on the network to use it as working storage.  

Virtual Solution

A simple technique to reduce the IT support costs for your server and ensure that you get up and running quickly after a crash is to use server virtualisation. With a package like VMware it’s possible to move an application between servers and to have one server doing the work of many, so providing the ultimate in business resilience. With VMware each application runs in its own virtual server environment, so an application can be swapped from server to server seamlessly, and as each application runs on its own, there are no conflicts over memory or devices.

Top tips for business continuity

1. Back-up data regularly and store copies off-site in a secure place. Practice restoring the  data in an IT system outside your own to ensure it works.
2. Identify your business critical activities and set out the tasks needed to restore them and resume trading off-site.
3. Identify the core resources that support your critical activities and source replacements in advance.
4. Keep contact details for your staff, customers and suppliers off-site so that you can contact them in the event of an incident.
5. Be clear about what your insurance policies cover and what they don’t.  Review your insurance cover regularly to ensure it keeps pace with any changes in the business.
6. Make an inventory of equipment, materials, products and other assets to give you an overview of the business.
7. Make arrangements for a temporary base.
8. Test your plan and make sure you review it.