How Are Your IT Disaster Recovery Plans Looking?

If your answer to that question is a hunt through a filing cabinet searching for an outdated or incomplete plan, you could be looking at a significant financial loss if disaster strikes. When only 16% of UK businesses have formal cybersecurity incident management processes in place it becomes clear that the message isn’t getting through to everyone that downtime is expensive for every business.

Before we talk in detail about how SDC can support your Disaster Recovery Plans, let’s look at the types of disaster you should be prepared for:

• Natural disasters including floods, epidemics and extreme weather
• Technological disasters including software, hardware or infrastructure breakdown
• Human induced disasters such as cyber-attacks and sabotage

In this blog, we’re looking at these disasters from an IT and connectivity perspective.

Natural disasters rarely affect one property or business but that doesn’t excuse you having your own DR plan. Include a plan for staff to work remotely where possible and ensure they will have access to the hardware they may need as well as data and software. Remote servers come into their own in this scenario as do telephony systems such as VOIP, which allow your staff to answer and make calls from other phones including their mobile as if it is from your business number.

According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. Because there are so many differences in how businesses operate, downtime, at the low end, can be as much as $140,000 per hour, $300,000 per hour on average, and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end.

Ultimately, any sort of downtime caused by software, hardware or infrastructure breakdown is going to be expensive and the longer it takes to fix the more it is going to cost. Make sure your disaster recovery plan includes easily accessible and regularly updated contact details for your IT experts. If they don’t know your business well, make sure you have details of your infrastructure and hardware/software available and ensure access codes and passwords are securely stored remotely to reduce delays in set up.

At SDC we can be available to assist you immediately and if we are your telephony and connectivity service provider, we can resolve problems even quicker. Get in touch to find out about our Essex IT support turnkey solution.

Only 16% of UK businesses have formal cybersecurity incident management processes in place and today’s flexible working systems increase the risks of hacking incidents or data breaches. Make sure your staff are trained in IT security and receive regular refreshers. Ransomware attacks cause an average of 16.2 days of downtime for businesses, which is costly. Ensure you have written procedures for reporting issues and communicating to affected stakeholders to minimise the impact and contact your designated IT expert without delay.

Our local response team has extensive knowledge of malware and access to up to date information. We can get to you fast and our comprehensive remote monitoring and support solutions ensure we can often get to the problem before you know it’s there. With SDC, you can have one provider who understands your systems, helps you to scale and adapt as your business changes or grows, and manages everything from your hardware to your telephony and office solutions.

With so many of our everyday work processes reliant on IT, it is paramount that you are prepared for things going wrong. We understand that it is not often cost-effective for your in-house IT expertise to reach the levels demanded by today’s technology, which is why we offer our scalable support packages.