A branch office, by definition, is not a company’s headquarters. As all the really important data, information and systems are likely to be concentrated at headquarters, disaster recovery efforts are likely to be focused on that part of the company too. By comparison, branch offices are more tactical than strategic.
Business revenue interruption from a branch office may depress a company’s results overall, but for any healthy enterprise, any such interruption should not in itself lead to bankruptcy. So what’s the drive to get disaster recovery correctly implemented for these remote locations that, apart from their sales performance, are often so “out of sight, out of mind” for the rest of the corporation?
Revenue shortfall in a branch office could be frustrating, but reputational damage to the corporation because of remote IT failure could be catastrophic. Customers air their opinions and grievances all over the web nowadays.
Local upsets snowball into international disasters, thanks to online media and social networks. A customer in Timbuctoo who says your disaster recovery stinks can be heard by a customer in Tokyo, and so on.
Missing out on revenue may be the least of your problems, faced with this customer “thumbs up, thumbs down” power.
So, how will you roll out effective disaster solutions to all your branch offices and get them trained and ready to deal with such issues? Will you have to spend half your IT budget on staffing a huge support team to remotely monitor and fix local branch systems that are misbehaving?
This blog article is too short to dive into all the possibilities, but we can leave you with one thought. Instead of rolling out DR solutions to all locations, it may be smarter to roll all locations towards one DR solution – one housed in the cloud for example.
For the sake of your company and its reputation, now is perhaps the time to start drawing up lists of objectives, cloud technologies and suppliers to make DR a reality across all company locations.