Riots spur companies to review disaster recovery

Posted by Karen on Aug 25, 2011 12:00:00 AM

Two weeks ago, with the skyline of London and other cities across the UK slowly filling with the black smoke of burning cars and buildings, many were speculating about how much damage the riots would cause - both economically and socially. We often think about the immediate effects of the damage, i.e. loss of destroyed or looted stock, reduction in trading hours, but it seems that some of our retail clients and SME’s were also considering the cost of losing corporate data in such an event. The riots illustrated that without warning one could encounter disruption to their current office environment. A loss of one’s premises is a serious enough matter, yet if the right measures are put in place to ensure that data is stored and backed up in an offsite location, the risk of losing everything that keeps your business going is greatly reduced. Cloud technology allows business to store information off-site in a high security data centre. With a multi-layered approach including security personnel, CCTV, motion detection and key fob access, data centres are a safe place for your data and can be accessed quickly and easily by employees through any form of internet access. As part of our 'tried and tested' methodology, every member of staff in the company runs desktops hosted in the datacentres with information being shared between multiple physical locations simultaneously. This means that the backup is actually the version we use day to day, making the switch to another location easier and less of a disruption to staff. So in the actual offices we don't have any servers and the desktops just run a client to access the user desktops. Therefore should we suffer an issue (riots or not!) with the office our disaster recovery plan can be quickly executed.

Topics: News