Ensuring your business stays up if IT goes down

As every IT manager knows IT is not only mission-critical to every business, it is the most likely single-point of failure in day-to-day business operations. IT systems downtime costs British business millions of pounds each year and that figure is increasing.

Loss of data, loss of sales and damage to brand reputation are only one side of the downtime costs equation. The potential staff time loss can be staggering, and the actual ‘re-boot’ costs of system retrieval can be mind-boggling.

Amazingly, many businesses seem to think that taking home a back-up tape is sufficient. The sobering fact is that the more sophisticated the system the more there is to go wrong and the more it will cost to put right. Londonprepared.gov.uk claims that 80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within weeks and 90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster close within 18 months.

Quite simply, while all businesses tend to hope for the best, they also need to plan for the worst. And when it comes to having the answers, the plain fact is that many businesses don’t know what questions to ask in the first place. That is where outsourcing continuity planning to ramsac becomes a stress-free option. We will:

• Plan how to replace and re-configure hardware
• Assess how best to maintain communication with customers and suppliers
• Ensure data is backed up to best practice guidelines
• Plan emergency contact provision for IT suppliers
• Analyse the impact of key IT staff loss in an incident

At all stages, ramsac will plan for varying degrees of risk, from the extreme of total network destruction to the less conspicuous, but potentially equally damaging, situation of your network being compromised by external attack. We will thoroughly document a range of scenarios.

While this may all sound rather dramatic, buildings do burn down or get flooded. Data does get left in briefcases on trains (ask the Government!). Senior IT people are involved in accidents.

We work in a world where the IT continuity plan and disaster recovery plan is de facto becoming the business continuity plan. We bring our experience to bear alongside that of your own IT and continuity planning team and we have the expertise to ensure the resulting output is robust and future-facing.