Client press release: Business continuity just as crucial for the SME market

There is more to dealing with a system failure than just backup and recovery. An organisation, regardless of its size, needs to be in a position to continue its business in the event of an unplanned incident that derails business functionality.

Greg Wilson, MD of Reflex Solutions, believes that most small to midsize companies are not properly prepared for such an event. He says that a lot of companies seem to believe that because they have backups, it means that they are safe. However, many fail to test the data recovery process. This means that they don’t know if it even works, or if it does, how long it
will take to recover and how many working days may be lost in the process.

“It is critical to test the various aspects of your disaster recovery plan regularly. A key time to test is when making a change to your infrastructure, although you should nonetheless perform regular checks. If data is absolutely critical to your business, you should test at least once per month, otherwise at least twice per year,” says Wilson.

“During this testing, I would also recommend that businesses get their service provider to test to different types of hardware. Remember, a leading cause of disasters is hardware theft, and it can be difficult to restore your backups to different hardware. The other question you should ask is how will you communicate with clients during this downtime?”

This is where business continuity comes to the fore, continues Wilson. Business continuity is what is required for an organisation’s business-critical operations in the event that the normal office is made untenable.

“In the small and medium enterprise (SME) market, most companies have traditionally not
even considered business continuity solutions, because of their high cost. However, there are new technologies available and service providers like Reflex can now combine disaster recovery and business continuity for the same cost. Thanks to the advent of cloud computing, it is now possible to backup your information to a virtual server. This not only provides the necessary backup, it also removes the headache around hardware compatibility, since your server
is now virtual.”

“Reflex has also developed a business continuity solution designed with SMEs in mind. While we provide the backup into the cloud instead of onto tape, we can now also offer clients physical seats should these be required. This means that for those mission-critical aspects of the business – such as your contact centre – you can have your people operational at the business continuity centre, while the rest of your administrative staff can use the cloud for access.”

According to Wilson, as the company is an SME itself, it fully understands the critical need for such a service in the small and medium market segment. Reflex’s 20-seat business continuity centre on its premises gives its customers the security of knowing they can continue working, even in the face of calamity.

“Reflex is able to customise our disaster recovery and business continuity solution to suit organisations of all sizes; it is simply a matter of getting the right costing versus benefit model to suit the individual client.”

“My advice to SMEs when looking for such a solution is to not fall into the trap of purchasing a typical vanilla offering. If you choose the right provider, you can not only obtain a solution designed specifically for your business and at a price that suits you, but you can craft one that enables you to compete on an equal footing with enterprise level organisations,” concludes Wilson.

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