A few weeks ago we had a power cut at the ITSB office which meant we had to trigger our Disaster Response plan to ensure that our customers continued to receive support services from us.
Thankfully, operations were returned to normal pretty swiftly, but our Disaster Response plan had a huge role in ensuring our customers were not affected. Here’s how we built a successful DR strategy:
1. We had a plan! We can’t stress enough how important this is: if you have a disaster response plan in place, you’re far more likely to ensure that downtime is minimal and customers aren’t affected.
2. Our phone system is in the cloud. This meant there was no reliance on the power service in our building for telephones, so we could make any important calls to the right people to help us deal with the issue, and also ensured customers could still contact us.
3. We could answer all calls on our mobiles as if we were using a fixed handset on the desk.
4. We had a UPS in the office offering 1 hour of uptime whilst we implemented our plan. This powered our router, firewall, network switch and wireless internet connection.
5. Our whole team uses laptops which meant we could operate on battery power during the power cut and could still remotely connect to customer computers and sending our proposals.
6. 30 minutes into the outage half of the staff went home to work from their laptops whilst the remaining staff covered calls. Once the first wave of staff signed in at home the remaining staff left for home.
7. Myself and our Operations Manager remained in the office whilst we surveyed developments for the power issue to be resolved by electricians. I am writing this whilst tethered to my mobile using cloud based email on Office 365
8. All of our core applications reside in the cloud and are accessible over a secure connection from any company device
In most typical businesses we talk to about Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning this outage would currently be sitting at 3 hours and would cost their business £100’s if not £1,000’s per hour. The cost to us was staff leaving slightly earlier than usual and then picking up work from home. The service impact to our customers was virtually zero.
Do you have a disaster recovery plan? Get in touch to find out how we can help you put together a response strategy so you can minimise downtime in a situation like this. https://www.itsupportbusiness.co.uk/contact-us/Contact ITSB