Business Continuity Planning – Part 1
Sunday, May 31st, 2009Hello readers and welcome back to the Silentblast blog. Today I am going to mix it up a little bit from the previous posts I have done which focused on you as a business communicating with your clients, customers and potential customers. Today and possibly the next few posts I am going to talk about the advent of some form of crisis or disaster that has affected your line of communications and more importantly previous lines of communications. Â Again my focus is more so the current client base of Silentblast, the small business sector and even right down to the personal level.
Firstly what exactly is Business Continuity Planning or BCP? Well, in laymen’s terms it is the ability and capability of your business to recover and continue operations after a critical component/s of it has been either been disrupted, damaged, severed or destroyed. There are many levels regarding BCP, from the workforce, IT, product and service deliverability, supply chain, to other physical concerns such as your business locations, offices and warehouses.
Disruption of a business can take many forms from a BCP perspective as I described above but also to illustrate and maybe as a food for thought; have you ever considered your action plan in the event of a major data failure or disruption? A lot of people and for that matter small business don’t factor in the probability of failure of their data. There is a common misunderstanding that every time you turn on your computer, it will work like a charm. Despite mass media stories about various virus threats that have plagued both personal and business users there are still those who take the risk of “it can never happen to me.”
Even those who do take precautions from an anti-virus standpoint still have issues of threats from spyware and malware and to cap it off; backing up data. The backing up of data has to be one of the least practiced small business responsibilities that are not done. If you believe that partitioning your hard drive into two virtual drives and copying files from one to another is doing the trick someone has either completely misinformed you. It is still the same drive. If the drive goes; the data goes, no matter how many times you have partitioned it.
So what should you do really? Well, to keep it relatively simple let’s just look at a single computer. Most computers today come with a minimum of a CD burner but more than likely a DVD burner. A CD will hold roughly 700mb of information and a DVD will hold either 4.7G as a single layer or roughly 9G as a duel layer. The later takes a special DVD burner that is slowly becoming standard; but the blank media is still more expensive for DVD duel layer.
If you are installing a DVD burner as an example into a machine you most likely will be given some form of SE Edition. Essentially a dummied down version of a full blown media suite to copy or make photo CD’s, copy files for back up by an internal “drag and drop” utility of some kind and other media related sub-utilities.
Personally I would look into more specific software for backing-up data. One that comes to mind is Norton Ghost 14.0. I have made the name into a link so you can read on it from their website and see if it is for you.
In addition I would also highly recommend a backup drive (external). There are so many on the market right now and the cost are really reasonable. I have one that is 1 Terrabyte is size and I throw everything on it just to keep my internal computer hard drive as empty as possible. What I really want to preserve long time I just burn to DVD (usually two copies) and file in a CD wallet.
How often you do backups is entirely up to you. I would advise that if your adding a significant amount of data within a day that is critical; then probably daily you should be backing up. Minimum though should be at least every week. So I would do it something like the Friday; before closing the down the office computers for the weekend if your business is not operating on weekends.
So this ends Part 1 and I will write more in other parts regarding Business Continuity Planning. But as a final thought remember that one of the aspects of your business, being a website when hosted by a reliable service provider will perform daily backups as the norm. All of Silentblast’s current customer base are hosted on servers that are backed up on a regular and continual basis.
Silentblast Interactive - Toronto Web Design and Development
Canadian owned and operated, Silentblast is a professional web design and development company in Toronto serving small and mid-sized companies in the GTA, Brampton, Vaughan, North York, Markham, Mississauga, Oakville, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Silentblast also develops mobile web site design and development and mobile applications for the iPhone and other mobile phone platforms.
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