Disaster Recovery Planning

Do you have a plan, that covers what to do if something happens to your office space? What about if Microsoft (yes, not much chance, but stick with us) disappeared overnight, what would you do in terms of your email and access files? Have you tested your backup system to ensure files and folders can be restored?

The plan doesn’t need to be massive and doesn’t need to be chapter and verse (but there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s what you’re after). It could just be a couple of pages long which covers the basics, with some bullet points and who to contact to get things in motion.

It’s something we did ourselves a while back, and we just made sure we had a list of possible alternate locations to work from (this was before the pandemic by the way), along with who to contact in that situation. Alongside this we documented how to work, and who our alternate phone providers are.

Having a list, even if it’s just a loose outline will really help you when the pressure is on. It means, even when you’re under huge pressure, you just have to follow a couple of sentences and phone the number which is already in the document – you don’t even need to get into a panic that you’ve not got the relevant person stored as a contact.

We’d recommend taking things a little further, and doing some checks around backup and working from anywhere where applicable (as many of you will already work from various locations). 

Backup testing, especially for those of you that run a physical server, is something you should do on a regular basis, at least once a quarter. It’s much better to test when there is no pressure on your business, than finding out there is an issue when restoring things when you really don’t have the time for a hiccup. For those of you using a service like Office 365 for file storage, you should have a backup in place which is external to Microsoft, and stores at least twelve months’ worth of backups, meaning you can restore any file/folder to a selected point in time.

Another part of our disaster recovery plan is literally to grab a spare laptop (or buy one from PC World) and go to the nearest Coffee Shop, as we can work from there with no problem at all. It’s super simple, but also completely valid. If you can do that, you’re in a good place already.

So, have a think today about a disaster recovery plan, and put something together covering:

• What do if there is a problem accessing email and files
• What to do if your phone system isn’t working
• What to do if there is a problem accessing your office workspace
• Who to contact in an emergency/who will be able to help
• Regular review and testing of backup solutions

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions an IT Support business in Redditch. He likes to plan around the worst-case scenario, in the hope it never actually happens.