Even small businesses need business continuity plans

When people talk about business continuity and disaster recovery, it's often with the subtext that this is what big organisations do. Small businesses don't have either the resources or the need for it.

Of course, this couldn't be further from the truth. As a small business owner, what would you do if you lost all your crucial business data? What would the impact on your relationships with new and existing customers be if your office was hit by a fire, flood or theft?

This is really something everyone should be addressing. For Nuvola, all of our data is backed up nightly on our high-spec web hosting servers (which are themselves backed up), our email will automatically divert to a third party server if ours is unavailable, and our phones go through VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and therefore only need a net connection. Basically, all we need is a connection to the internet to run our business.

But can that be said for everyone? If you do backups to tape or something similar that's great, but you still have a problem if you can't get to the server because it's been stolen. And what about any specialist software you might have installed on your PCs?

Obviously, we speak with a slightly vested interest because all the systems we build for our customers do only need an internet connection to work, but in the wider context there's so much more that many small businesses could do ensure their business can keep running if there's a problem with their office. For example, online backup services and the like are not expensive these days, and there are plenty of options for browser-based business software.

There's a great little article on this at The Register, our favourite tech news site, with two very good whitepapers aimed at business owners which you can download in return for a free registration. Highly recommended reading, even if you think you've got this covered.