They take many forms and can be anything from a full on disaster, malware or a careless employee hitting the delete-all button. 

A recent independent survey of businesses that suffered an incident discovered

• 75% of all businesses without a business continuity plan fail within 3 years

Planning for a disaster often drifts down the priorities of a business until an incident occurs and your business grinds to a halt. 

• Globally a minute of digital downtime translates to a financial loss of between £3,750 upto £225,000 an hour in all industries.

Business Continuity is not just the exclusive consideration of big business or the public sector. The principles apply to all organisations and are just as effective within SMEs as they are in larger ones. Having Business Continuity plans in place can bring significant credibility to smaller businesses enabling them to more effectively compete with the big players as they demonstrate professional planning as well as demonstrating that they can seamlessly deliver even if there office is under 10cm of flood water.

Don't Wait

The quickest and easiest way to protect your critical systems is to get the data offsite to a different geographic location. Nowadays state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure can protect your business from downtime, by backing up, protecting and allowing you to instantly restore critical data even if your physical hardware has been destroyed, so you can regain productivity in minutes rather than weeks

The key is to pragmatically determine what your critical data is so you can identify and prioritise the resources and infrastructure that must be available to enable essential business functions to resume. What keeps your business going? Is it Email? Databases? Your booking system or Ecommerce platform? What impact would there be if your customers couldn’t continue to transact with you after an outage?  These factors will help to set appropriate priorities for recovering systems and data so you can determine the right solution for each.  By prioritising your data you can protect the most critical first.  This is where RPO and RTO features in your plans.  These are the two expressions frequently used in BC parlance; Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

The acronyms...

So what are they?  RPO defines the amount of data, in time, which your business can afford to lose for a particular system. For some applications, recovering data from yesterday or even last week may be ok, so the RPO would be days or weeks. Other applications and data, for which any loss is not acceptable, you may choose to have a RPO of minutes or less. While RPO defines how much data is protected, RTO defines how long it takes to recover that data. RTO is the amount of time the application can be down and not available.

It’s critical that your Business Continuity service provider understands the unique requirements of your business, including various workloads and the data used to enable your workflows.  They should be able to adapt the technology to suit your operational and financial plans as well as have the capacity to support your existing or prospective business continuity plan

Having a good relationship with your provider is the critical component to deploying an appropriate solution for your business that integrates with your current operations and future plans. Having your data management solutions developed and deployed by a provider who has experience  and you can build a good rapport with means you have the continuity in place that YOU need not what your supplier thinks you want. 

DCG has 15 years’ experience of managing a diverse customer base with a mix of needs and requirements.  We specialise in getting the right fit for your data as we know that every business is unique.  So failure need not cost you after all.