Don’t operate business I.T. on a wing and a prayer
It would be so easy, in light of the massive BA tech foul-up which affected travelers globally, to write another piece on why disaster planning is important.
BA know this, of course, they just found out the hard way that they hadn’t tested (or hadn’t successfully tested) whether their recovery plan would work in the real world!
High profile failures can be most useful, however, not because they teach us the value of planning, but because they remind us that this can happen to anyone!
We only hear about the infamous cases such as this, but businesses face crises of this nature on a daily basis, though we don’t hear about most of them because they’re not newsworthy. Sad to say, far too many firms which experience this are not at all prepared to get back up and running with usable and up-to-date data ready to go.
In most cases we’re not actually talking about a massive investment or the need to duplicate every system. What’s required is to actually have a well thought-through plan which ties in with data backups and restore processes. Depending on the failure experienced, fresh hardware could be necessary to get back to work, but that’s not a problem either if it’s in the plan and you know what would be needed and where it would be available from at short notice.
Once you have that plan, you need to put it to the test – not once, but regularly, taking into account any system or practice changes that have happened since the last test (or are likely to happen before the next one!).
This massive headache for BA really should make everyone sit up and take notice. It wasn’t a hacking attack, which can cause people to feel that it happened because the individual business was targeted. This was a technical mess-up caused by not being thoroughly prepared for the repercussions of a failure – and failures can happen to anyone, at any time.
If you would like to talk about being properly prepared and what it might take to get your business there, give us a call for an obligation-free chat.