Continuity Planning

You’ve Lost Your Internet. Now What?

When you start talking about disaster recovery and continuity planning, you tend to lose the room. That’s because deep down we’re eternal optimists – bad things happen to the people you see on the news, not to normal, regular people like you and me.

You’re probably right. Earthquake in East Malling? Landslide in Lenham? Can’t see it.

But what if it was something that could happen, like your office internet going down. It would probably get mildly irritating if it was down for a few hours, but what about a whole day?

I just so happened to give that example as that’s exactly what happened to a client of mine a little while ago. Particularly bad news as they use a clever, feature-rich phone system which is – you guessed it – internet-based.

So here’s how you can prevent a disaster

1.The internet is crucial for our work, as we also have an internet-based phone system. As a result, we pay for a second internet connection from an alternative provider.

2.Power surges are the most common cause for breaking routers and frying switches; simplify connections and invest in UPS protection (that’s a big battery, not a delivery company!) for the sake of a couple of hundred pounds. Think of how much you would lose if your clients couldn’t contact you.

3.Make sure you backup your work to the cloud; if you can’t work from the office you can achieve greater continuity if you can still access your work and have a list of all key supply chain contacts (which you regularly update, of course!).

4.Have a simple Disaster Recovery Plan – this could be a case of having a couple of spare laptops and gathering around whoever has the biggest kitchen table.

5.Work out what you can do about redirecting your calls . You could funnel them to a mobile phone, or to a dedicated virtual receptionist – just like we provide – if you receive a high number of calls.

You might roll your eyes at the thought of a genuine ‘disaster’ affecting your business, but losing an important member of staff, a key supplier going out of business, or just a simple power cut affects businesses like yours every single day. It doesn’t have to be a 100 pages long, it just needs to be a plan.

Make Miss MPS part of your Disaster Recovery Plan. Our Virtual Assistants can take calls, process orders and retain continuity to keep your customers happy working from our East Malling office. Read more about we do at www.missmps.co.uk/our-services.