DISASTER RECOVERY - PART 1 (Insurance Safeguard)

In the early days of 1982 when we first began Taylored Systems, it was a simple process to have a disaster recovery plan. Back then, you only had to worry about phone lines, and phone systems. If you were a small or medium sized business there was no voice mail or ACD (Automated Call Distribution). Exchange servers and internet came along a few years later. If anything you had a single standalone PC, and not everyone had a computer. In those days sales of fax machines were the going rage, and we spent several years selling them. There was only one phone company, Indiana Bell. If the phone lines went down we would contact someone at their home office to get help as call forwarding was just becoming popular, and if the phone systems went down we had spares in our warehouse to correct any problem.

In those simpler days most people did not expect you to return a call immediately, if you got back to them in the same day they were lucky. Now days when people call they expect either an immediate call back, or an email answer. Technology has come to a point where we live for immediate gratification in everything that we do, and because of this we are concerned about not only our phone lines and phone systems, but our internet connections, fax machines, voice mail, unified messaging, routers, Ethernet switches, exchange servers and regular servers. Should any of these go down or out, we would feel as if we were back in the dark ages using only candles for illumination, and the pony express for message delivery.

Taylored Systems has an existing Disaster Recovery Plan in place to keep us going in case of an emergency. Under our plan we have a T1 that provides our internet and phone line service, and a separate circuit that we share with other companies on a different server as backup, we also have a Toshiba CIX670 in our warehouse to replace the one in use. We do tape backups every night and change them every morning, and each week they are taken off premise for safety. Tapes are now becoming a thing of the past. Now we are transitioning into a BDR-Computer (Backup Disaster Recovery) to securely transfer our data and be within a short reach in the event we need a recovery.

With disasters like Katrina, the floods in Indiana that occurred last summer, and tornados almost every summer, we just need to be aware that anything can happen and we all need an insurance safeguard to keep our business running smoothly. Even though we were not in the midst of a natural disaster we have had to use our redundancy plan due to an outage. We simply logged into a website, and plugged our phones into our back up SIP trunks which kept us in business during the three hours the lines were down. With products like the BDR and a PLAN, it is now just as simple to manage all of our complex technologies as it was to manage the few pieces of equipment we started with in the early days.


Mary Couch’s conversation with Bill Taylor