When IT disaster strikes, you know who to call

Back in January 2014, the team were all sitting at home enjoying their respective suppers after a long day. Then shortly after 7.30pm a call came through to one of the director’s mobile phones. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear but it needed immediate planning and action.

A fire was gaining pace and ferocity at an industrial unit next to Hove Lagoon and the IT system needed saving, straight away.

Did you know 93% of businesses without a Disaster Recovery Plan go out of business within one year?

It’ll never happen to you, right? What are the chances? But it does happen. Fire, flood, hurricane – anything.

In this case it was a fire, and not a small one either. There were eight fire engines on site and the building was almost gutted back to its external brick fabric.

The fire (and the water from the fire engines) wiped out the office, the furniture, the paper records and all the computers.

At 5am the following morning the building was deemed safe, so that’s when we went in to recover whatever we could.

The plan was simple – take what we can, assess what condition it’s in and see what we can recover. Thankfully in this case there was an offsite backup that was happening daily, so the worst-case scenario was that they’d lose a day.

Having been given another office to use by the landlord, by midday (less than 24 hours after the fire started), we had recovered all the data and they were up and running on temporary computers.

The business continued, which meant the wheels kept moving and (further) disaster was avoided. It wasn’t for almost another year before they were back in their actual offices, following a full refit. But thanks to the swift actions of our team, they were able to carry on working throughout.