Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Be it flood, fire, disease, theft, civil unrest, DDOS, power cut, hardware failure, police incident, IT security compromise or a malicious employee - any business can be seriously impacted by a disaster.

When considering Disaster Recovery (DR) a business must carefully assess threats it perceives what, if anything it should do to mitigate those risks and how. This is normally done in the form of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) including a risk assessment.

With the reliance on IT growing day by day for most businesses their IT systems are often critical and this is where ServerHouse can help.

What's Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is all about having a backup plan should the worst happen.
If you can't get to your place of work how does your business continue to trade? How long an outage would be detrimental to your service? What do you consider the risks to your business are? How long can you wait for your business to recover?

Having a business continuity plan is critical to any business, even a burger van. Often the plan won't be expensive, sometimes may not cost anything at all, but by looking at the options in a calm controlled manner when you have the luxury of an operational business you can determine what exposure you're happy with and what time to recover and to what level is acceptable.

A simple example

Mick's burgers

Mick and his son run a burger van selling burgers in a lay-by his business has the following threats

  • Cooking Fire
  • Crash the van
  • Van is stolen
  • Mick Gets ill
  • Health Inspector shuts him down
Mick's turn over is £15,000 per month and he's confident his client base will be ok for a week without him.
He can assess these risks, determine how he would recover from each of them and what impact it would have on his business. Once he'd determined this he can consider any pre-emptive action to limit his exposure.

So we'd expect Mick's BCP to include a fire extinguisher, perhaps look at a tracker or secure lock-up or a wheel clamp for his van. Talk to his insurers to establish how long he might have to wait for a repair and if they would cover him purchasing a new van or hiring a van in the event of a claim and keep on top of his food hygiene. Mick can't do much about getting ill so he accepts this might happen but it shouldn't be for more than a week.

However if you're business relies on an IT solution you may need to recover in 2 seconds or 2 hours, each business has its own unique threats and needs, talk to us today about how we can help

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Our DR Services

  • Consultancy
  • External Assessment
  • Real time DB mirroring
  • Cold/Warm/Hot DR
  • Off site - online data storage
  • Off site - offline data storage
  • Business Continuity planning
  • Pre-emptive solutions - service on demand
  • Reactive solutions - rapid same day set-up
  • Flexible charging systems
  • Solutions to meet your business size, needs & budget
  • Emergency office space
  • Emergency Colocation
  • Emergency Rack space