Plan Ahead to Avoid a Tech Disaster

It’s every business’ worst nightmare – a disaster that can prevent you trading, have serious financial ramifications and cause mass upheaval for staff and customers.

Whether in the form of a physical disaster, such as a flood or fire, or an online cyber attack, your IT systems can be at the heart of the disaster. Knowing what to do and when is vital to mitigate damage and get you back up and running as quickly as possible.

Being prepared is key. For the vast majority of our clients, we will already have worked with them to have a ‘Disaster Recovery Plan’ in place, which lists out what the key risks are, the potential litigations and then the actions and timescales to achieve a recovery.

If you are unfortunate enough to experience a disaster, the first thing we do is assess where things are at and what the scale of the problem is. Once we know what the situation is, we would implement your Disaster Recovery Plan, which could include the following:

• Setting up a short-term work place – whether that’s getting IT equipment into a temporary office, organising home working or setting up a server in the cloud so files and data can be accessed.
• Organising new hardware – if equipment has been damaged, laptops, screens and servers may need to be rented or replaced.
• Organising any legislative reporting – if there has been a cyber attack or data breach, companies have a statutory obligation to report this to the relevant bodies/organisations. Lifeline IT will know how to do this and will handle it for you – we have offices across Europe and know the different procedures for individual countries.
• Keeping a comprehensive log of all disaster recovery activities and spend for insurance purposes – most companies will be claiming on their insurance so thorough record keeping is vital.
• Getting you back in your premises – this will involve migrating you back into your original (or new offices) once the damage has been repaired.

If you want to know more about preparing for a disaster, contact one of the Lifeline IT team.