Business Continuity

Having the most secure systems in the world will mean nothing if you can’t access it.

If your IT systems were not working or available when you need it, maybe due to a cyber-attack or some natural disaster, what impact would that have on your business? Would your business survive?

Studies have shown that 80% of business who have lost access to their data, cease trading after 6 months.

We always start ‘with the end’ in mind. What we mean by this, is that if all other protection measures fail (multiple security layers) then at your final ‘back-stop’ is your DRP -disaster recovery plan. This could mean a simple file and folder restore to a cloud service. Or as quick as a spin-up of multiple live servers to separate cloud (or on-premise) infrastructure that demanded the service be available 24x7x365.

Ask yourself, what is the risk to the business if this particular service was not available, and how long could my business survive without it?

Think about the following items and see if your business can tolerate the downtime:

• Do you have servers in your office? If so, how redundant is your connectivity to the internet and is it backed by a good 4-hour resolution Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
• Do you need a fail-over service (with a separate comms provider) whilst this is being repaired?
• Depending on the criticality of your business IT services, how long can you afford your critical services to be offline? What services can we put in place to either keep this online or spin up should we need it available right away?
• Test and measure! Perform regular tests on your DRP so when a service is unavailable, you can put the plan into action.

One point to note… Even if your services are in the cloud, don’t assume that it is impenetrable. We would always ensure that our clients’ data/services can be restored using third-party backup systems.

So, how is your IT risk tolerance? Can we help measure it for you?