Our business involves a lot of
international travel for the principal consultants. However as a UK
company we are bound by Company Law, UK Taxation laws and of course
the needs of our clients that we must maintain long term records in
an easily accessible form. We depend greatly on the availability of
the Internet, voice/video conferencing and telephones. We often work
across time zones so access is required to our systems pretty much 24
hours a day.
With the exception of physical
documents stored for tax and company law reasons we hold no paper
documents on a long term basis. Occasionally we'll print a document
to work on it, but essentially all records and collaboration
procedures are electronic. By the nature of our business we have to
be mobile and often geographically dispersed, but we also need to
have good access to our computer systems at all times. We need good
document management so that we have a good document trail and also
ensure that everyone works from the most current version of a
document. We have the facilities of a large enterprise.
If a 747 aeroplane dropped from the sky
onto our offices we could be back in business within two hours or
less; excepting any people squashed in our offices. We wouldn't lose
any documents, our contact lists and our phone system would be
intact. We'd maintain all of the design, planning, accounting and
billing systems. If there was a regional power outage or a flood the
impact would be the same; none at all.
How often do we test our business
recovery process? We don't. Resilient distributed working is part of
our daily routine. Our systems are all configured to work seamlessly
if some part of the whole system is unavailable. We also have local
resilience at our office in terms of Standby power generator, UPS
power, resilient Internet and Wide Area Networking.
This all sounds rather expensive, but
it is not. These are our typical budgetary costs per person for
technology per year:
Personal computing/portable: - £400
Power:- £150
Phone (Mobile & Land line):- £400
Internet Access:- £250
Office software:- £0
Software Maintenance:- £0
Support Technician/Help Desk:- £0
Servers:- £0
Email:- £0
CRM:- £0
Cloud Services:- £300
Web Hosting:- £150
Office rental, cleaning etc:- £0
Document storage:- £0
Specialist design software:- at cost
Total annual cost: £ 1,650 to provide
resilient office and technology per employee. Circa £140 per month. If you want to know more contact me. I'll be happy to discuss, for free of course.
Here's some background to one of the techniques: - Google Apps
Here's some background to one of the techniques: - Google Apps
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