Almost anything can be classified as a disaster, but some failures are more disruptive to businesses than others. Can you really ever be prepared?

Yes, we can be reasonably prepared.

The key to a successful plan is a plan.

Does a small business need a Disaster Avoidance Plan? - Small businesses are more likely to suffer from business interruptions since there are usually very few fault tolerant systems in place. For example, when the power goes out for an extended period of time, there may be a UPS backup, however in many cases there are no personnel trained on proper shutdown of the equipment. During prolonged outages, the batteries of the UPS normally will be exhausted after ten to fifteen minutes, resulting in a system crash anyway. Even though UPS monitoring may be established on the servers, many database programs must be shutdown manually, and Windows does not perform that shutdown sequence.

Just some of the questions that need to be answered before hand, while the risk is low:

Who determines when a disaster has struck? - It is important to classify a disaster within your company, if only to determine when it is necessary to begin a recovery. What does your office consider to be a disaster? What systems can you live without? What systems will stop business? Who determines when the company must shutdown? Often times the company will shutdown when access to data has been lost, however there are times when access to data may be lost, and the company must stay open for business. Determining these issues before disaster strikes can make a big difference to the bottom line. Also who is responsible for the data on a daily basis? That person would probably know when it is necessary to recover the data and when it can be rebuilt or repaired. Failure to do this part correctly can set a company back days and even weeks.

Who are the backups in the event key personnel are lost or unavailable? - This goes without saying. If the MIS guy is out of town, and cannot fly in until the disaster is over, who will be able to do his job? These things must be in place before anything goes wrong, primarily to protect the company from accidents, such as restoring old data over new. It has happened, and in some cases the person who took charge was not the person with the knowledge needed to complete the task correctly.

Who are the contacts to replace hardware? - Within the pages of your documentation should be a list of contacts. These are third party companies that were used to build your network in the first place. There may be computer people, cabling people, software people. You will need the names of all of them, and emergency contact numbers. These items should be in all copies of your documentation.

Where are the current copies of data? - The most critical part of any recovery plan is to have some data to recover. Tape backups should be stored in a safe place, and alternate copies should not be nearby. Often times other copies reside at other locations or hot sites. It is imperative for employees to know where to go to get the most recent copies of data. The procedure to keep those copies current is imperative, failure to do so can set a company back years.

The following tips will help you get prepared:

• What are the Critical Hardware and Software Applications?
  
• Who are the Critical People and at what level are they trained?
  
• What is a Critical Recovery Time?
  
• Who are the Critical Vendors?
  
• Who are the Critical Customers?
• How do you appraise your assets and manage the life cycles of your equipment.

FSDM - Our methodology for IT has been built up from 20 years of computer networking experience, and what makes us different is we wrote it all down.

Managed Services - Our solution will allow you to manage your business while we take care of the tools that make your business run. Our experience guarantees your IT department will be a better more responsible department. Our policies and procedures give you tools to see what is really going on.

Documentation - We document our work, and your network. If things go bad and you have to evacuate the building, there are procedures for shut down, for evacuating equipment, and protecting data, written so that anyone can figure it out. Minimize your risk, call Marloe Group today.