Disaster Recovery: When Suppliers Fail

Recession affects your IT vendors as much as it impacts you and your customers. No IT system is immune from disruption. But economic instability brings a new IT risk beyond the ones you’re accustomed to: the threat of one of your critical suppliers failing.

“… there are steps you can take to minimise the downside risks should one of your suppliers reduce its operations to the point where it’s unable to meet your needs.”

Just as it is prudent to plan for disk crashes, power failure, systems overload, human error and natural disasters, it’s also wise to plan for a major service interruption to your network, hosting, telephone and other IT services. While a vendor’s actual stability is beyond your control, there are many steps you can take to minimise the downside risks should one of them unfortunately reduce its operations to the point where it’s unable to meet your needs or even ceases trading altogether.

Disaster Mitigation: Key Planning Points

1. Review your Disaster Recovery (DRP) and Business Continuity (BCP) plans with your IT support provider: Factor in reduced customer support from your major hardware/software suppliers as well as access outages. Your checklist should include things like service migration, mirroring critical applications and data back-up.
2. Tools: Ensure your IT support has the necessary diagnostic tools, techniques and processes to quickly replace hardware, troubleshoot software and recover data following a systems or service failure.
3. Run a test scenario: Try implementing your disaster recovery solutions with a key element or provider missing. Measure the impact of, for example, the physical loss of a back up disc or tape (where is that data replicated?). Find out in advance how you’d recover from complete failover if your hosting provider is unavailable. How would you replicate key systems if your freelance Database Administrator (DBA) is missing?
4. Backup: Following directly on from the point above, have back up suppliers for all critical IT service providers, not just for data. If you’re relying on individual contractors under different roofs, consider a firm that provides what you need under one umbrella.
5. Company account: Get your hosting and service provider information in order, update it, renew any expiration demands quickly and provide alternative contact details. Store copies of hardware and software licenses, domain name registration(s), IT and Web site hosting, telephone systems, etc. in a safe place–so that if a supplier runs into difficulties, you can access your systems and services and quickly move them elsewhere.

Find out how to protect your IT investment with comprehensive disaster recovery.

Network Installation: Lean Networks for Lean Times