What are your Critical Systems?

Getting power back on

Who do you contact to see when power will be available again.

Who do you contact if power will only be returned to your location after a safety check has been made?

Who do you call to repair any damage to the internal structure of your wiring?

Office access

To a level that staff can come in.

To a level that walk in customers can come in.

Access to hard copies of client information.

Getting the office systems up

What is the order of importance? What services must you have and how soon? The order below is a general outline of what any office needs, your order my differ.

1. Telephones:
   • Who do you call to get your land lines going?
   • Who do you call to get your cell phones going?
   • Can you divert your land numbers to cell phones?What if your PBX has died?
   • Who can repair it?
   • Who can replace it?
   • Do you have a contract or an expectation with your provider that they will treat you with priority?
   • Can you access your telecom demarcation point and plug in old analog phones that will run off the power in the telephone lines so you can at least make and receive calls on one or two phones?
   • Do you have a backup answering service that can receive all incoming calls and txt message the appropriate people? People wanting to be in contact with you will feel attended to if they have some form of contact with you, even if it is an answering service. A good answering service will make people feel that they are in contact with you!
2. Internet:
   • Who is your Internet provider?
   • Is there a backup service that you can use?
   • Do you have a contract or an expectation with your provider that they will treat you with priority?
   • Who is your email provider?
   • Is there an alternative method to be able to receive your emails?
   • Do you have a contract or an expectation with your provider that they will treat you with priority?
   • Who is your web provider?
   • Can you access your website to place pertinent information for your customers to access?
   • Do you have a contract or an expectation with your provider that they will treat you with priority?
3. IT system (Power)
   
   • Having power back is one issue, having power back in a clean and reliable form is another.
   • Do your IT systems have good power backup hardware that will enable the core systems to remain up for 15 to 30 minutes? This would allow you to continue to operate during a time when power may go out for 30seconds to 5 minutes at a time as well as keep your systems safe from spikes and drops in line voltages.
   • Is 15 to 30 minutes enough time?
   • Should you have back up power that lasts longer?
   • What is considered core systems? This would be more than just the servers and switches. You will want a number of the office computers to also be on backup, as it is not helpful to work flow during a disaster recovery for the power to go off and staff to have their gear crash even though the server stay live.
4. IT systems (backups)
   • Servers and network are up and running, but there is some corruption of data, files and software.
   • What is the data recovery process?
   • What has to happen for a full data roll back to yesterdays data to be triggered?
   • Who knows how to do this?
5. IT systems (hardware recovery)
   • Hardware has been damaged, either to the point of replacement or re-installation of all software.
   • What is the process for achieving hardware recovery?
   • Who will you buy new hardware from?
   • What will trigger this actions?
   • Do you have a process in place where it is possible to be able to action hardware recovery with minimal intervention from eternal IT support?