Why a disaster recovery plan is essential for your business

It is common for SMEs to say that, because they are only a small operation with a relatively small number of clients, they don’t need a disaster recovery plan. But, what would happen if your office flooded and destroyed your phone lines? What if your emails were hacked and your company data was stolen? How long would your business survive if your business phone system went down for a prolonged period-of-time because of a disaster?

A disaster recovery plan is necessary, whether you have one customer or 1,000, as it describes the process, policies and procedures to follow in the event of a disaster. It will ensure that your business will be able to resume normal operations as soon as possible.

Losing your ability to communicate with your internal and external stakeholders is a serious matter. How long would your business be able to survive without your phone system? How would your reputation fair if your clients’ data was hacked? These are all questions you need to ask yourself if you don’t currently have a disaster recovery plan.

Although disasters are uncontrollable, dealing with them in an effective manner is easy. Creating a disaster recovery plan in conjunction with your telecoms and IT services provider means that you will have a list of viable disaster recovery options. For example, you could have a second broadband line installed, a dongle to use for PAYG broadband, calls diverts, data recovery and a professional voicemail setup in the event of a disaster, to mention just a few of the steps outlined in a disaster recovery plan.

We would recommend that your disaster recovery plan includes; an inventory of how your IT and telecoms equipment operates, identification of any business critical operations and the SLAs associated with them as well as the risks that could impact them, assign responsibility for overseeing the recovery efforts, a list of circumstances in which the disaster recovery plan will be invoked, assign severity to each circumstance, describe physical safeguards in the building. Finally, ensure all members of staff are familiar with the plan.

If you need any help creating a telecommunications and IT disaster recovery plan, the Network Telecom team are on hand to help. Contact them on 01952 221 312 or email them at enquiries@networktelecom.co.uk