Will Your Business Survive?

A disruption in the technology infrastructure can cause a serious threat to the stability of any business. Click here to review Disaster Recovery Planning & Prevention - Part 1.

Assigning Tasks is Crucial. Everyone should know what their responsibilities are when a crisis occurs. In our ongoing example, we know that payroll, accounts receivable and current quotes are most crucial. Payroll is assigned to the controller, accounts receivable is assigned to the bookkeeper, and current quotes are handled by the sales manager.

Creating Recovery Plans. Each individual will develop a plan based on his or her assigned area. Using payroll as an example, we’ll detail a recovery plan the controller might undertake.

A. List of all the contact people with phone numbers and pagers who are involved in the process:

1. Internal or external IT staff.
2. Staff responsible for offsite backups of payroll data.
3. Manufacturer of the payroll program.
4. Bank or payroll service provider to manually call in payroll.
5. If payroll can be done manually, document the procedures.

B. Maintain an offsite backup of the master payroll program with all items needed for installation, including documentation.

C. Determine if the payroll system can run on a standalone machine. How will non-standard items like expense checks be handled if the system is down for an extended period?

D. Having tasks and procedures in place before a crisis is crucial, whether facing minimal downtime of a few hours or downtime of several days. Keep two copies of the disaster recovery plan, one copy offsite. People with assigned tasks need to meet semi-annually, or when an event forces a plan update. Items that will force an update include:

1. Moving physical location.
2. Changing or updating any major application used in the critical processes of the company.
3. Changing of any personnel who are assigned tasks.
4. Any major update of the network infrastructure, including new servers or new operating systems.
5. Changing priorities. Items that were not important in the past, such as Internet email, are now critical.

Testing the Recovery Plan Often. Testing is extremely important. Often, businesses attempt to restore critical information from a backup only to discover that the backup media is bad or the important information was not backed up. Performing a test run of various disaster simulations will work the details out of any plan and keep recovery times to a minimum during an actual crisis. These items do not represent everything needed for successful planning and recovery, but provide a good foundation.

Stay tuned, the newsletters during the next two months will go into more detail on the prevention and recovery of disasters. If interested in learning more, contact Micro Visions.