Could Your Agency Survive a Disaster?

Disaster recovery is one of those terms that is often misunderstood. You may well be quite comfortable not having a detailed, thoroughly tested strategy in place for if your office is blown to smithereens, or swept away in a tsunami – after all, that time and money could be better spent dealing with things that are actually likely to happen. However, having some form of disaster recovery and business continuity plan could really save your agency – and in events far more probable than fires, floods or war raging in the town you work in.

Disasters Scale with Your Business
The smaller your business is, the smaller something that could count as a disaster in relative terms could be. For a one man operation, without the right risk management in place even something as seemingly trivial (and common) as having your phone stolen, or your laptop breaking down and losing all its data, can cause huge amounts of damage and problems for the business. Where an SME type business may be able to cope very easily if something like this happens, they can be put into a state of needing to invoke their business continuity and disaster recovery plans by something as simple as their office location becoming inaccessible for a period of time, or their internal servers going down.

Are You Letting Technology Cover Your Back?
Most of the challenges raised in business continuity and disaster recovery planning are actually very easy to address these days thanks to technology. If you use cloud based recruitment software, on an SaaS basis, you can be sure you won’t lose any important records or information you work with no matter what happens to your site or hardware, and by using this in combination with mobile technology, you and the other people within your agency can work remotely from any device, allowing you to keep the business operational without candidates or clients ever even noticing there has been a disruption. If all of your important data is held on or backed up to the cloud, and you have the ability to access it remotely, your technology has covered the bulk of your business continuity concerns for you.

Policies and Planning
If you now feel confident that your infrastructure is suitable for keeping your agency resilient if there is any kind of challenging incident, that is most of the job taken care of. However, it is a good idea to draft a proper disaster recovery and business continuity plan filling in the organisational stuff that can cause upset when you need to start working to these plans. This can include things like how you will keep in contact with each other if you are all working remotely because of an emergency (for instance if there is snow and nobody can get to work). Will you have a daily conference call to touch base? Will there be any extra responsibilities while you are working under emergency conditions and who will they fall to? Thinking this stuff through and drafting a policy only takes an hour or two, and distributing it to everyone now will make things far simpler if you ever need to use the plan.