With rolling blackouts predicted just as the post sector hits its busiest period, it's time to review your disaster recovery plans With the post-COVID backlog barely cleared, a winter of rolling blackouts looming and a newly distributed workforce, this year looks set to be a challenging one for UK post houses. One of the most important steps you can take to protect your business and reassure your clients is reviewing your disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans. Pre-sales consultant Phillip Boettcher is here to help
First of all, what's the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning? Phill: Disaster recovery is the process of regaining lost data, media and work after an outage or system failure. Your disaster recovery plan should explain the steps you take to protect your assets, how quickly you could recover them if something went wrong (known as your recovery time objective' or RTO) and how much data you can afford to lose (known as your recovery point objective' or RPO). If you can afford to lose one day's work and it'll take you 12 hours to restore from a backup, your RPO is 24 hours and your RTO is 12 hours.
A business continuity plan details all the steps you take to help people keep working if your facility is compromised. For example, do your editors all have thin clients at home so that they can work remotely if your office catches fire? Do your admin team use cloud-first software so they can log in from anywhere and continue managing clients if your own network goes down? Questions like these should be answered by your BC planning.
How often should businesses review these plans? In an ideal world, you should be reviewing disaster recovery and business continuity plans every six to twelve months. However, many companies we work with will make an ad hoc plan when their facility opens and fail to keep it fit for purpose as the company grows. In fact, many established companies only dusted off their plans once the 2020 lockdown forced their hand.
Why is it so important to address these issues now? 1. It's front of mind for your clients - and Ofcom. After a series of high profile disasters, Ofcom launched an investigation into - and recently issued a report on - the lack of resilience in broadcasting services. It specifically mandated that all DR systems should support video, audio and accessibility content such as subtitles, be regularly tested and be subjected to simulated emergencies to ensure their effectiveness.
2. We're heading for an energy crisis. The UK government are refusing to rule out rolling blackouts this winter, which means your system could be subject to a sudden or planned complete loss of power. Many facilities we speak to have a layer of legacy hardware somewhere in their technology stack that has worked for so long no-one bothers to test it anymore - which means no-one knows if it will turn back on following a power cut. Now is the time to test these systems, update elements that need to be updated and ensure the content that depends on them is securely backed up.
Relatedly, if you've never performed a controlled shutdown of your systems, now's a good time to get that strategy in place, understand how long it will take and identify any weak links in your infrastructure that could cause problems in the event of a forced shutdown.
3. Your RTO and RPO are probably in flux right now. We're heading into the busiest time of year for post facilities. That means you're handling more data than usual, are dealing with more assets at once, and are probably gearing up to add freelancers to your team. All of which increases the strain on your back up and recovery systems.
Let's say a post house has decided that their RPO - the point up to which they can afford to lose their data, is one day. At the end of each day, the day's work is automatically backed up to an offsite location overnight. In the event of a catastrophe, they can simply restore the last backup and voila, they're now only a day behind.
As long as the backup solution works, that is.
During peak times, their network may not be able to transfer all the necessary data during the overnight backup window, leaving holes in their record and creating queues that prevent their most recent changes from being safely saved. The time to discover this has happened to you is not after a blackout; it's now, while you have time to improve your throughput before those freelancers arrive.
4. Remote working complicates things. Are your staff taking media home with them when they work remotely? Are they making changes to media locally before uploading it to your shared storage system? All of that needs to be accounted for in your disaster recovery plan - no matter how many locations you may now have data in.
5. Your post-pandemic workflow can be shored up. We're on the other side of COVID now, and a lot of the remote systems that seemed adequate when you just needed to find some way for people to work will no longer seem sufficiently robust.
This is an ideal time to revisit those systems and shore them up with more long-term remote and hybrid working solutions, which will improve the resilience of your facility and make it easier to ensure business continuity during the most high-pressure time of year. While remote working does complicate things from the point of view of backup, the slew of remote and virtual tools available now is a real blessing when it comes to business continuity, and it's well worth exploring your options.
What are the consequences if companies don't get their plans up to date? If being publicly shamed by Ofcom isn't motivation enough for you, try the oft-cited University of Texas study that found 94% of businesses that suffer catastrophic failure don't survive. Or t
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With rolling blackouts predicted just as the post sector hits its busiest period, it's time to review your disaster recovery plans With the post-COVID backlog barely cleared, a winter of rolling blackouts looming and a newly distributed workforce, this year looks set to be a challenging one for UK post houses. One of the most important steps you can take to protect your business and reassure your clients is reviewing your disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans. Pre-sales consultant Phillip Boettcher is here to help 
