Developing your business continuity plan

Imagine your ICT network was affected by a virus....

• Is your key data backed-up?
• Do you have digital data stored elsewhere in hard copy?
• How would you recover data? Would you need third party support?
• Could you continue to work without ICT to maintain your most time-critical activities?
• Who would you need to inform that you have been affected by a virus? How would you do this? What would you say?
• Would your staff know what to do?

For this scenario, good risk management would be about checking your anti-virus, firewalls and network security arrangements - are they good enough to protect your systems? SME's are a potential goldmine for hackers, and serve as a playground for 'newbie' hackers. Just think of the reputational damage caused by the theft of personal customer data...could you do more to ensure that your data is safe? So, as well as recording the different ways of working in your plan, you also need to know who will lead your response and who has the authority to make important decisions. Much of your incident response will be about good communication and information sharing e.g. with staff, customers, suppliers and anyone else with an interest in your business, so it is also sensible to include a communications strategy as part of your plan.

You need a Plan B

IT Hotdesk helps customers around the UK to continue to operate when disaster hits. Disasters like fires and floods grab the headlines but they don’t happen every day, more commonly IT disasters are caused by human error or systems failures – and those happen all the time. At IT Hotdesk we offer a full range of Disaster Recovery services, from initial consultancy, helping you to define your IT availability strategy and DR Plan through to design and implementing of tailor-made DR solutions. We’re here to meet the recoverability needs of your business and offer unique guarantees around keeping your business working when you encounter an IT failure- whether small or large. We give you the functionality and service level required at individual server level. With IT Hotdesk you gain complete peace of mind. Whether it comes from a technology failure, a natural disaster or just user error, IT Hotdesk restores business continuity in minutes. If you would like to find out more information give us a call - 01224 511611.