You come into the office on a Monday morning to find that a pipe has burst, and your desks are sitting in pools of water. What would you do? You are preparing for a major presentation when the fire alarms and overhead sprinklers go off. Do you have a place to go? Having a backup workplace recovery site will minimize downtime and house your critical staff in the event your primary business location becomes unavailable.
It’s not an if, but when situation. While you may not be in a geographical area that exposes you to natural disasters, there are risks that every business face. No business can 100 percent escape equipment failures or human errors. If it is not a natural disaster, then it could be faulty wiring. Having a secure secondary workspace is how your business stays a float when faced with risks or disasters.
Learn about the benefits of a workplace recovery site to help prepare your organization for success in any condition.
What is Workplace Recovery?
Workplace recovery is a secondary location that is designed to replicate and function as your corporate office when you need it most. Having this second workspace environment enables you to minimize the risk of unexpected downtime at an affordable and predictable cost. If a disaster strikes your business, a workplace recovery plan can prevent damages to your services, productivity, reputation and finances.
LightEdge’s work sites are equipped with desks, power, phones, computers and connectivity. We can house your critical staff in the event your primary business location becomes unavailable. Your services can quickly be turned on at the disaster recovery workspace to minimize downtime.
Just as you would stock your home with supplies and prepare your property for disaster ahead of a storm, it is important for businesses to understand their risk profile to ensure redundancy of their data before it is too late.
No matter your departmental role or industry you serve, no one will be spared from disruptions to the status quo this year. As we look to changes ahead, both in the workplace and in service to customers, it is key to keep an open dialogue with other business units to stay aware of evolving demands for the viability of your business.
Are you Prepared?
The results of a 2016 Disaster Recovery Journal survey of more than 500 C-level executives and IT professionals uncovered some alarming data. While nearly 70 percent of C-level executives feel their organization is “very prepared” to recover from a disaster, less than half of their IT pros at those same organizations shared this view.
The same survey revealed which industries feel the most prepared for a potential disaster. Among them, 67 percent where in the banking industry, 58 percent in the government sector, and 55 percent at technology companies “felt very” prepared to recover IT assets should a disaster strike.
Despite their aggressive compliance requirements, the healthcare industry is not among the group that feels “very prepared.” The survey points to the fact that 18 percent of healthcare organizations still rely on the public cloud for their disaster recovery. With regular public cloud outages, this groups is predictably nervous.
Other industries that are lagging in disaster recovery efforts include education and manufacturing. According to the survey, only 38 percent of those in the education sector feel “very prepared” to handle a disaster. Manufacturing is even less. Just 35 percent of manufacturing firms feel “very prepared” to recover. The survey points to the manufacturing field adopting newer technology at a slower rate than other industries. More than half surveyed in the manufacturing industry acknowledged that they were still relying on backup tape drives.
What to Look for in a Workplace Recovery Site
There are no clear standards for choosing a disaster recovery site. So how do you determine the appropriate level of geographic diversity? Disaster recovery is an important aspect of a company’s strategy for providing uninterrupted services to its customers and end users. So, insuring the company’s own network goes uninterrupted is critical.
5 Important Factors to Consider
A workplace recovery site is important for businesses as it helps to keep the organization running in adverse scenarios. Some of the important factors to consider when selecting a provider include:
1. Distance from workplace recovery site: Consider how far the distance is between your primary office and the secondary site. This is crucial since it will impact latency and performance of applications. If your workplace recovery site is housed at a larger distance, you will not be able to mirror data in real time in an effective manner. This will cause a risk that data will be lost if we need to switch to a disaster recovery site in event of a disaster. Look for a local partner in your area, so you will be able to access them easily in any scenario.
2. Services Available: It is important to know just what services will be provided to you by your workplace recovery site partner. What utilities, telecom features, office supplies, etc. will be available? Also, when are these services going to be available? Is there a limited time period you and your critical staff are able to access these services, or will they be available 24×7?
Here are some high-level details on LightEdge’s Des Moines and Kansas City’s Workplace Recovery sites:
Des Moines Workplace Recovery Details
- Located in Des Moines, IA
- Ample onsite parking
- Voice-over-IP (VOIP) phones
- Fully-connected meeting rooms
- Security-controlled building access
- 24/7 access to workspaces and services
- Lodging served by several hotels within the area
- Wi-Fi internet access
Kansas City Workplace Recovery Details
- Located in Kansas City, MO
- Onsite parking
- Voice-over-IP (VOIP) phones
- Fully-connected meeting rooms
- Security-controlled building access
- 24/7 access to workspaces and services
- Lodging served by several hotels within the area
- Wi-Fi internet access
3. Accessibility of workplace recovery site: Another factor to consider will be accessibility to the workplace recovery site. This will become important during a disaster when you need to switch up your operations. If the site is accessible, operations can be resumed faster. This will focus heavily on access to transportation, interstate accessibility, proximity to an airport and so on.
All of LightEdge’s workplace recovery sites are in close proximity to International airports and interstates that connect each of our data centers. We also have lodging served by hotels within the area and onsite parking, as listed above.
4. Capacity: Capacity of a workplace recovery site is something to consider when vetting providers. Will the site be able to house all of your critical staff? Understand how many available work spaces are available to accommodate your staff.
5. Environmental Details: The next factor to consider is the environmental details in the area of your workplace recovery site. Details to consider include weather, environmental hazards, natural disaster exposure, seismic zones, and airport landing paths. For example, while LightEdge could be exposed to tornados, our Altoona data centers are F4 tornado resistant, while our Kansas City data center is located underground.
Here are other physical environmental details of our workplace recovery sites:
- Ideal for locality & geo-diversity
- Seismic Zone 0
- F4 tornado resistant building
- Outside 500-year flood plain
- Not in airport landing path
- Zero hurricane hazard
What Makes Businesses Feel Prepared?
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 40 to 60 percent of small businesses close permanently after a disaster. Among businesses that are closed for at least five days, 90 percent fail within a year. What separates the prepared from the unprepared? What is it that makes businesses continue to succeed, while others of the same size and manpower fall short in the face of disaster?
Some common themes among those that have sufficiently prepared their disaster recovery and business continuity plan include having established DR compliance requirements. Organizations with clearly defined compliance requirements tend to be more confident in their ability to recover from a disaster; largely because they were forced to address the issue.
According to the 2016 Disaster Recovery Journal survey, the second factor pertains to hosted solutions. IT professionals feel more assured if they use Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and/or a managed service provider (MSP) environment. Leveraging DRaaS, which provides near real-time recovery of IT assets via the cloud, increased confidence by 17.5 points. While moving IT infrastructure offsite by deploying a managed service provider environment increased confidence by 22 points.
However, there is an awareness gap between on the benefits of business continuity and workplace recovery sites. The awareness gap appears to be 7 in 10 IT professionals having familiarity with the technology, compared to just 5 in 10 executives. This awareness gap of the benefits of the service, means many IT professionals need to begin educating their executives before gaining budget approvals for disaster recovery efforts.
What Does an Outage Mean for your Business?
The longer a disaster takes your business offline means a larger loss of productivity, and higher likelihood of losing profits. According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute. That is around $300,000 per hour. For most, this would be catastrophic.
The leading cause of outages continues to be hardware failure, server room issues and human error. While most businesses believe they would be able to recover from a disaster, 90 percent of businesses without a disaster recovery plan will fail in the aftermath of the disaster.
No one wants to set aside precious money for something that may or may not happen. This leads to lack of disaster recovery funding, which in return ends up costing the business much more in the end. In fact, as a result of their experiences, 11.5 percent of respondents who suffered an outage increased their budget for disaster recovery, reported the Disaster Recovery Journal.
For most, an outage in the workplace can create a huge drain on the bottom line. Having a plan for when an outage occurs is the key to keeping your employees safe, your customers happy, and your profit losses down.
Secure Your Workplace Recovery Site Today
What would happen to your mission critical infrastructure and data if a disaster were to hit this very second? Where would you go to get back up and running as soon as possible? If your answer is up in the air, you could be putting your organization at risk of going out of business. Thankfully, LightEdge can help. Now that modern IT practices have started to blend physical with virtual, and cloud with on-premises, safeguarding your applications and data requires several tools and methods.
LightEdge is committed to keeping our customers’ IT operations, critical applications, and data protected. We provide the technology and resources our customers require to get back to a production state that meets their RTO and RPO requirements.
LightEdge offers a comprehensive set of disaster recovery solutions to ensure uninterrupted performance of IT operations and mission-critical systems in the event of a disaster. Our work sites are equipped with desks, power, phones, computers and connectivity. We can house your critical staff in the event your primary business location becomes unavailable. Your services can quickly be turned on at the disaster recovery workspace to minimize downtime.
The reliable availability of business IT is essential to the management and livelihood of every company, large or small. All elements hinge on the dependability of your technology to deliver vital information right when you need it.
Redundancy is built into each of our data centers located in Des Moines, Kansas City, Omaha, Austin and Raleigh facilities. Each of our LightEdge facilities strive to deliver more than traditional data centers. We have created true Hybrid Solution Centers designed to offer a complete portfolio of high speed, secure, redundant, local cloud services and managed gateways to public clouds through our hardened facilities.
Want to learn more about LightEdge’s workplace recovery and business continuity services? Contact one of our disaster recovery experts to get started or to schedule your private tour of any of our data center facilities. We have disaster recovery, colocation, and business continuity experts standing by to answer any of your questions.
To get more information on disaster preparedness, download our Guide to Disaster Preparedness whitepaper or our Cyberattack Threat and Prevention guide.
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