ROI apparent when companies use business continuity practices

Business Continuity Forum 

Many businesses contemplate putting business continuity practices in place in case of an emergency, especially in IT where data systems and information can easily be backed up by a secondary server that mirrors a primary device.

However, it can often be difficult for companies to see the immediate benefits of such recovery plans, as one hopes disaster never strikes their enterprise.

On the other hand, international law firm Bird & Bird, whose infrastructure manager Jon Spencer recently has experienced first-hand the benefits of maintaining a comprehensive business continuity strategy.

"Businesses may not appreciate the value of business continuity systems, but they really do when systems fail," Spencer said.

As the company utilises many mobiles, it had backed up a server for its Blackberry users. And when that primary server failed, nothing skipped a beat due to its back-up planning.

"None of the firm's 240 Blackberry users experienced any interruptions in their messaging services in the two days the primary server was down," he explained.

Two days without mobile communication between colleagues at the company - not to mention contact with clients - could have proven disastrous for the business. Taking a cue from this incident, the company recently decided to more effectively back-up other servers as well, including its document management system (DMS).

"Protecting the DMS with clustering provided some level of redundancy, but we needed something to protect us if the shared storage failed or the primary data centre was unavailable," Spencer said.

Jason Morton