How often do you try out your disaster plan? If you’re a small or medium business, the default answer is “what plan?” or “we’ll find out when it happens”. The reason is cost, complexity, and apathy. CFO’s balk at the cost of most technology. Technology folks struggle with where to start and how to justify, as not all disasters are equal or require the same response. Finally, the norm for most management is that even when knowing the first 2 facts, they do business as usual because “it’s never happened before because we have smart people and redundancy” (or whatever helps them sleep at night).
Rather than bore you with steps to take to recover from a disaster, the following are some current and nominal cost approaches of how we run our business (and of course help clients do the same):
- Recently, a key employee’s spouse was badly injured in a car accident. We were able to advance some additional salary for a short period during the spouse’s recovery. Cash is king in business. You don’t want to have too much as it signals possible operations problems to potential buyers and excess dollars should go to shareholders, but you must have enough on-hand or readily available to cover such situations.
- After another summer storm, our main domain controller died. As best practice, this server shared no data or ran any key applications. The second domain controller took over ready and able to service the whole network, using DHCP failover strategy. While operations ran normally, our team was able to seize critical roles and manually remove the domain controller from Active Directory.
- Major storage for a client failed. Fortunately, our online backup had a full copy of the data, including databases and server system states. We managed to keep the storage running in a degraded state and minimized customer downtime, by moving data and virtual servers to other locations. Online backup continued to run regularly and after the hardware problem was resolved, the data moved back and synchronized with the off-site backup.
- A contractor blew the transformer for our building. Fortunately, we run our business using cloud computing with services like Office 365. Our personnel were able to easily and securely work from home for a day with no loss of operations for customers.
Now the scary part – all of these things happened in the same month. We survived because of business acumen with little additional cost. Our Virtual CIO services can help you identify how to run operations that are disaster ready. If you were the average business, would you still be in business without your key employee, main server, critical data, and a power outage?