Business beaver

March seemed to be panning out well until one evening, sat working at home, my tablet pc started making nasty crunching noises. It didn’t sound good and went downhill from there. Having sent the hard disk away for data recovery it came as a serious blow to get the report back saying that nothing could be retrieved.

It’s human nature to take things for granted until they are suddenly taken away from you. I was lucky as most of my files are held on our network servers but there were still a number of items that I was working on that were lost.

I’ve raised before the issue of disaster recovery for small and medium sized businesses and my latest experience serves to bring it to the forefront of my thinking again.

Disasters do happen to UK businesses, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Telecoms or utilities failure, gas leak, flood, fire and terrorist threats are just some of the events that have affected UK businesses over the last couple of years.

Larger corporates have invested heavily in comprehensive business continuity plans to safeguard the future of their operations and yet smaller companies operating from a single site are just as likely to suffer from unexpected business interruption as its larger neighbour.

One of my partners, Ian Sumbler, has recently presented to other firms of accountants at a series of disaster recovery seminars around the UK. He was surprised to discover the number of professional firms whose disaster recovery plan comprised simply of regular backups and offsite storage of data. Raising questions about seasonality of workload, i.e. tax staff in January, and who took priority for relocation depending upon the time of year was generally met with furious scribbling of notes by the attendees.

An effective business continuity plan comprises of secure off-site back up, alternative temporary workspace and IT infrastructure. It isn’t necessary to relocate all employees immediately; experience suggests that between 20-30% of a company’s employees is sufficient to keep the business running during this critical period.

My point, a bit like the current TV campaign about checking smoke alarm batteries, is don’t wait for disaster to strike.

The hard disk on my pc crashing has been a nuisance but I can at least sleep easy at night in the knowledge that Morris Owen has a fully developed disaster recovery plan in place.

This article originally appeared in the April 2008 edition of Wiltshire Business

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