Three years ago, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, financial institutions located in and around the World Trade Center in New York City discovered they had not designed their data recovery systems to withstand the degree of devastation caused by the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers.
In its "Summary of 'Lessons Learned' from Events of September 11 and Implications for Business Continuity," the Security and Exchange Commission reported that "it was clear that business continuity planning had not fully taken into account the potential for wide-area disasters and for major loss or inaccessibility of critical staff."
Now, three years later, the rapid succession of Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne hitting Florida has caused businesses there to test the design of their disaster recovery systems.
In the event of a natural disaster or even a simple hardware failure, would your company's critical information be secure? Take this quick test to find out.
- Does your business have processes in place to systematically replicate and secure data that is critical to its ongoing operations?
- Does your business house its backup data in a location that is geographically remote from its primary location?
- Do multiple employees know how to access the backup data to maintain business operations?
If you answered no to any one of the questions, your company may not be able to recover the data necessary to effectively maintain operations following a disaster.
Tony Grijalva, of G&A Partners, a Houston-based Professional Employer Organization (PEO), says that is not uncommon. "We find that too few business owners have a fail-safe disaster recovery plan in place. More often, they think about it after they need it."
Failing to develop a disaster recovery plan can be costly for a small or mid-size business. While it is relatively easy to measure the costs to replace lost equipment, it is far more difficult to assess the less tangible costs that result from business downtime.
Businesses have to consider the costs of lost sales, lost customer goodwill, lost productivity, missed contractual obligations, as well as the increased costs incurred when attempting to make up these losses. Needless to say, having a recovery plan established that helps a company quickly recover data and restore normal business operations can minimize these potential costs.
In its "Lessons Learned" report, the SEC noted that one emerging disaster recovery model being used by some firms is to operate with two or more widely separated active sites for critical operations that provide inherent backup for one another. The strategy addresses many key vulnerabilities by, "eliminating dependency on availability and relocation of staff at any single location, reducing likelihood of telecommunications single points of failure, supporting maximum geographic separation, and assuring business continuity through actual use, rather than infrequent and less than complete testing."
G&A Partners manages integral administrative functions, such as human resources, benefits, and payroll, for small to mid-size businesses throughout Texas. As a result, the firm helps protect its clients' critical data by maintaining redundant systems and administrative files at multiple locations in and outside Texas.
"Because G&A shares many of its clients' administrative files, we essentially establish a redundant system, for payroll as an example, that is housed and maintained separately from the client's main operations." says Grijalva.
Grijalva added that, while G&A did not seek to enter the data storage or recovery arena, following September 11 the firm recognized this as an added benefit it offered its clients.
"We certainly encourage our clients to establish a complete and comprehensive data storage and disaster recovery plan for their organization, but to the extent G&A can contribute to or complement that plan, we are happy to do that," said Grijalva.
For more information on developing a disaster recovery plan for your business, feel free to contact G&A Partners at 1-800-253-8562.
