Protecting SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) against disaster

By Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca on Monday, January 5th, 2009. Filed under Technology & E-Business.

The employee who has never arrived at work one morning to find their PC is not working as expected (assuming that they use one) is part of a small minority. When it happens, the day's plans go to pot: not only is the work planned for the coming day delayed, but if the problem is serious, they may well end up repeating yesterday's work, as the chances are their PC was not backed up.

If they work for a larger organisation they can seek help from experts in the IT department, but if they are working for a smaller business they will probably end up sorting out the problem themselves. Disaster recovery at the personal level can cost businesses of all sizes dearly as PCs are one of the most poorly managed parts of any organisation's IT infrastructure.

Businesses take more care of their servers, even small businesses backup their servers regularly, the majority on a daily basis. So that's alright then? Well not really, just having a recent server backup does not imply that a small business can be up and running quickly the morning the staff arrive to find the main server has failed.

Most small businesses do have a server-some have more than one-but these servers are often managed not by an IT expert but by the MD or some other business or financial manager. Whilst they might have been diligently backing the server up, the majority of organisations where a non-IT expert is responsible for IT have never rehearsed for a server failure. When disaster strikes they will be likely to experience a lengthy disruption.

Some small businesses use a server merely as a way of sharing files and a place to back things up. But the most common use of servers is for running shared businesses applications, i.e., when a server fails many parts of the business will stop too.

Disaster might seem a distant risk to many, but when it happens, the time to business failure and bankruptcy can be short. Most small businesses operate from single physical location and in those locations sit their servers. So if the disaster is broader than a server failure and effects the whole building there is nowhere to work and no IT infrastructure.

Larger businesses are to able mitigate this risk by separating people and IT, data centres running critical applications are often physically separate from the offices where people work. When disaster strikes employees can be moved to a new location and still access the same IT resources. The data centre itself is often a more secure facility but to be on the safe side many larger businesses will have a fully redundant backup data centre.

Surely such luxuries are beyond the humble SMB? Not so.

Already, many SMBs make sure critical applications are off-site. The most common example is email; most business now consider email to be a critical application and many SMBs rely on an externally managed service. This may not have been a conscious decision but was just the best way to do things when the business was set up.

There are other ways in which SMBs can get IT out of house. Many other applications are available as managed services; accountancy, CRM, EPR, storage, etc. can all be purchased as a service from external suppliers who manage it all in shiny data centres with enterprise level management, backup and failover facilities.

But even if an SMB feels it cannot manage without its own server running applications that are unique to its business this does not mean the risk of disaster can not be mitigated. There are plenty of 3rd party organisations who provide off-site computing resources or will host and, in some cases, manage servers.

However it is achieved, there is no reason these days for a small business to be at the mercy of a total IT failure, but the majority are-plenty of opportunity for resellers to improve things for their small customers.

By Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca

Originally published By It-Director - www.it-director.com

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