Disaster Planning

Okay we have been flooded, the NComp@ss offices were under 2 feet of water, but we were answering email and working on websites within 2 hours thanks to a bit of disaster planning.

How did we achieve this?

• Data Backing Up – all important data was fully backup up, in fact because we use a LaCie Drive (www.lacie.com) we actually lost the back ups (and not the originals)
• Hardware precautions – we invested in accidental damage cover from Dell (our preferred supplier) – with in 24 hours replacement computer parts arrived.
• Online Services – We use Web mail (automatically supplied by NComp@ss to all clients) and Google Mail as back up – all email was therefore fully back up and available immediately (on another computer)
• Oursourcing – critical services were outsourced to multiple 3rd parties – in otherwords hosting, services and products were 100% unaffected.

We were uninsured, but the net total insurable damage to NComp@ss in the end was a single £50 hard drive. There was no loss of service at any point.

The inconvience caused however was considerable, a day was spent draining the office for use again, computers spent 4 days drying out and emails did stack up as time spent cleaning up was unavailble for ‘actual’ work.

Improvements to Disater Planning can be made all the time and that is the real tip of the Month, YOU NEED A PLAN.

As always if you have a disaster, please feel free to call us and see if we can help with your computer recovery.