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Five Steps to
Protect Your Business System from a Disaster
By David McCullough
You never know when disaster might strike. If one happens, the first thing
on your agenda as a staffing business owner or manager, after assuring the
health and safety of yourself and others will probably be: "How are we going
to do business?"
The lifeblood of any staffing business is information. Your client data,
orders, assignments, employee information, payroll and billing data, and
more. Information that's locked securely away in your software and systems,
unless they are destroyed in some kind of disaster. While you can't
anticipate when or if a disaster might occur, you can prepare for the
possibility of such an event.
How do you get started? There are essentially five steps that must take
place in order to protect your hardware and software investment from a
natural disaster:
Create a Disaster Recovery Team
Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan
Test the Plan
Communicate the Plan
Implement the Plan
Let's break these five steps down one by one to provide more specifics:
Create a Disaster Recovery Team -- Disaster preparedness and recovery is a
team effort. There must be a group in place that has been briefed on what
procedures and protocols to follow should an event take place. This team
should be made up members from four organizational components of your firm:
Information Technology -- the team member that is most critical to success
Operations -- your customer liaison
Administration -- the finance side of the business
Management -- Buy in from the top is critical
Each member of the team is important but look to your IT representative to
pull the whole plan together and make it work.
Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan -- Now that you have pulled together a
team, it is time to put your plan down on paper. Remember that your plan
should be flexible enough to handle different types of disasters, everything
from a simple power outage all the way up to a major incident. The plan
should include three phases, which are:
Preparation phase -- what are you going to do before the event to ensure
that you are ready?
Implementation phase -- now that the event is upon us, what do we do?
Post audit phase -- now that we have implemented our plan, what needs to
change?
Input from all business unit representatives on your team is critical. While
building the plan each team member should be considering three basic
questions:
What could my group do to prepare?
What will we do to keep the business running in the event of a catastrophic
situation?
What dependencies upon other groups do I have, and have I spoken to those
people about their ideas, suggestions, and concerns?
You'll probably want to gather some additional information to assist you in
developing a comprehensive plan that's right for your staffing business.
Then, assemble the following information:
Organization chart showing names and positions
Staff emergency contact information
List of suppliers and contact numbers
List of emergency services and contact numbers
Operations and Administrative procedures
Asset inventories
IT inventories
IT system specification
Copies of critical software
Communication system specification
Copies of maintenance agreements and service level agreements
Off-site storage procedures
Test the Plan -- Once the plan is developed and documented the next step is
to test it with a dry run. This will take a detailed level of coordination
among the Disaster Recovery Team members. The idea is to keep this test as
realistic as possible. That may mean that it happens in the middle of the
night and the group has to assemble and report into the team leader. It is
better to test it when you don't need it instead of finding out at crunch
time that there are holes in the plan.
After completing the test, there will surely be some modifications. These
changes will be uncovered once the team has a chance to sit back and review
each phase of the plan in detail. You should test your plan at least once a
year and then update it as needed. Open communication is important to
successfully modifying the plan so it will work for your company.
Communicate the Plan -- Now that you have a tested plan that you're
confident in, don't keep it under wraps! Let your entire company know that
you have a plan, that a team of representatives from each department was
involved in the creation of the plan and that if disaster should strike --
you will be ready. There should be a representative from each of your
business units that is responsible for communicating the plan to their
peers. The plan should be well-documented, including contact information for
the primary and secondary stakeholders, and then distributed to the entire
company.
Don't forget that communication of your disaster plan extends to your
clients, candidates, and associate employees as well. Letting them know that
you have a plan in place gives them the assurance that you're thinking of
the business relationship you have with them and that you will do everything
possible to maintain it.
There is an added bonus to this complete and thoughtful level of
communication. This will give your staff an increased feeling of confidence
and preparedness. It may also encourage your staff to take this 'plan before
you need it' approach in their daily work lives.
Implement the Plan -- When the time comes, don't panic, implement. You have
prepared, documented and tested -- now put it into action. Remember, this
event wasn't scheduled, so be as flexible as possible in a time of crisis.
You have been proactive in your planning but implementation is a time to
also be reactive to the current situation. Also, remember to perform a post
audit after the dust settles. Constant evaluation of your plan based on what
you learn will ensure that is up to date and as efficient as possible.
Each of these five steps is critical to the success of the overall goal of
being prepared. Your company and your situation are unique but the
guidelines detailed above offer a blueprint for preparedness should a
disaster occur. With a strong plan in place before any disaster, you'll be
able to get your business running with the least possible impact.
SIDEBAR: One staffing firm's Disaster Recovery Plan.
Hurricane season hit Florida hard in 2004, and Britt Landrum III, Chief
Technical Officer of Landrum Staffing Services in Pensacola, knew that he
was lucky to have survived without significant damage to his business. He
was determined to implement a disaster recovery plan for their information
systems so that he would have greater peace of mind in the future.
Britt considered setting up an offsite environment in Pensacola to house
another server to support their staffing software for emergency purposes.
Exploring his options to this plan, he spoke to his staffing software
vendor, VCG, about housing his server in VCG's state of the art facility in
Atlanta.
For his plan to work, Britt needed to have a parallel computer
hardware/software environment ready on a moments notice so that his business
would experience minimal interruption in the event of a disaster. VCG has a
reliable history of hosting multiple environments for their customers, so
they were quickly able to come up with a solution tailored for Landrum
Staffing's needs.
VCG's proposal was elegantly simple. A 'snapshot' of Landrum's data (changes
to the data made that day) in Florida would be made each evening and then
downloaded to the server in Atlanta. The server, the staffing software, and
the data would then be instantly available to Landrum's staff should they
need it through a remote connection.
In addition, VCG would take care of all the day-to-day management of the
server in Atlanta. VCG would charge a fixed monthly rate for the disaster
recovery services, just as they would for an ASP or Managed Services
customer.
Britt Landrum was quick to point out that, "VCG's continuous commitment to
our relationship and the way that they support their products were the
driving factors behind our partnering with them on this project", said
Britt. "We have a long history with VCG as clients since 1978, and they have
always been there to support us when we needed them."
About VCG, Inc
Our focus is your success. Since 1976 staffing firms have counted on VCG,
Inc. for staffing software solutions that help them improve the productivity
and profitability of their operations. Founded by staffing professionals and
technologists intimately familiar with the business of staffing, VCG is the
staffing industry's largest and most experienced dedicated staffing software
development firm. VCG solutions today power hundreds of successful staffing
companies and 12,000-plus staffing professionals throughout the U.S.,
Canada, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia.
For more information regarding VCG, or our WebPAS and StaffSuite products,
visit VCG Staffing Software or
call 800-318-4983. VCG, C-PAS, StaffSuite, TempWare-V, WebPAS, StaffSuite
WorldLink, and WebPAS WorldLink are registered trademarks of VCG Inc.
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David McCullough is Director of Operations for VCG Inc., the most
experienced developer of staffing software for the industry. |
