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by David Longworth - Thursday, 6th September 2007

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Reports about disaster recovery really are horror stories to small and medium-sized businesses like ours because we’re so dependent on technology.

We use it to differentiate ourselves from the competition. I don’t want to shock you, but the accountancy sector doesn’t have much of a heritage in being innovative. Goodman Jones has been around since 1934.

But our use of technology has really taken off in the past few years. We’ve been quite progressive in the things we’ve tried to do.

Six years ago, for example, we set up a private network for a client in New York so its subsidiary in the UK could access its accounting software.

We recently won an award for our website and e-business, GJ Online, which gives clients access to accounting software over the web. I also run a blog on the site, and that helps to get us noticed.

So we can’t afford to have a situation where people can’t log onto our servers. The impact on our reputation would be enormous.

We run payroll for various companies, for example, and there were quite a lot of generous employers out there towards the end of last year handing out Christmas bonuses.

But imagine if we’d had a problem and couldn’t produce the payroll output. Not so long ago, you could have phoned up and explained that you had a computer problem, but now that’s no longer a valid excuse.

As well as the client expectation, just having our servers down for a few hours has a serious impact on our productivity. If you have to take out one or two days of a professional’s time, then you’ll never catch up – it’s that simple.

We used to copy files to a tape and store it in a safe place as a back-up. But this is a pain – somebody’s got to remember to copy files at the end of each day, and people stop bothering after a while.

With tapes, you don’t tend to back up email, because so much of that’s on individual computers rather than on servers. And you only have data back to the time of your most recent back-up. I started looking for a better set-up.

But I just couldn’t get my head round some of the traditional business continuity methods like “clustering” – they’re complex and hugely expensive.

In the end we went with a company called Neverfail (www.neverfailgroup. com). It runs a second server mirroring what your primary one does, so you can simply switch over if there’s a problem.

The secondary server sits in a secure unit over in the London Docklands, and it mirrors all the critical sections of our business – files, database and email.

It doesn’t cover our website, but it doesn’t have to – that’s under traditional service agreements with our hosting partners.

Business continuity isn’t all about IT, of course. We also have a shared office facility where our staff could relocate if a disaster like a fire or flood occurred. Neverfail is a big part of our set-up, though.

It was cost-effective – £30,000 all in, and we took the opportunity to replace our server at the same time, which was about £3,500.

When you think about it, that’s only two to three days of chargeable time for us, so in terms of the business case, it was very easy. But it was actually more about our own peace of mind and protecting our reputation.

Since we implemented our business continuity setup using Neverfail, we’ve had a couple of situations that would have taken our servers down. My hardware guys tell me one of these would have taken a day to fix.

But on the occasions where we switched over, no one – internal or external – even noticed it. It’s almost invisible. If we had issues, my colleagues would know about it. So the fact they don’t is a measure of its success.

Tags: back-up, disaster recovery, business continuity, servers, payroll,