Failsafe Archives and Effective Disaster Recovery.

What would we do in the event of a disaster? This is something that we don’t think about on a daily basis. Maybe it’s the, “it will never happen to me” syndrome. The fact of the matter though is quite different. Disaster Recovery, or DR, is big business and corporate organisations today are certainly taking it seriously spending hundreds of thousands of pounds if not millions on disaster recovery strategies so that they can ensure business continuity.

The small business however, also needs to take disaster recovery seriously as the threat of a disaster, like a fire or a flood is not discriminatory. Disasters will affect the large business as well as the small, so having a disaster recovery plan is vital. This may be as simple as backing up our mission critical data. Today there is a plethora of online backup organisations that will handle this for you. But is an online or offline backup enough to maintain business continuity? What about the paper trail, the hardcopy information that may also be lost? Companies remain paper driven and in the event of a disaster it is the paper trail that is lost and it is a well documented fact that 80% of companies who lose their data, paper, electronic or both, will go out of business within eighteen months. Having a sound disaster recovery strategy therefore is vital.

The problem is that small businesses cannot afford to spend the kind of money that large corporates do when it comes to DR. So what can they do? Is there a way for SME’s to work from any computer with an internet connection so that company records can be accessed, bills can be paid and invoices raised. Where employees could continue collaborating on projects and carrying general day to day tasks? To answer these questions we need to consider the 7^th benefit of an online document management system: Failsafe Archives and Effective Disaster Recovery.

Here’s an example: During Hurricane Katrina, a Hershey client was given warning to evacuate his office. Taking quick stock of what he could save, he picked up the document management server, put it in his car and drove off. Once at a secure location he was able to retrieve all paper documents that had been scanned as part of a daily process and save his business. Obviously this was before the advent of the cloud technology that we have now, but this customer recognised that the device he took had all the information on that was required for him to continue to work.

 Similarly an online document management system running in the private cloud, at a reputable tier 4 data centre, where the archives are backed up and where there is a guaranteed server up time is surely something to consider as part of an effective and affordable disaster recovery strategy.

Contact Hershey UK for more information