Your IT - Your Future!

Without doubt your organisation's IT services are fundamental to your operation. You cannot properly exist without your computer systems operating efficiently.  If you think nothing can go wrong you are burying your head in the sand (and there's enough of it in the South West to do just that)!

Whether your company is large, medium or small, if your operation is impeded then your costs mount up, your cash flow suffers and, if you cannot contain it, the Receivers are waiting in the wings to charge fortunes to wind you up.

I am not trying to frighten you, but Dun & Bradstreet reported the South West recording 2,094 business failures during the first half of 2001.  Whilst this was a decrease of 8.9% on 2000, this accounted for 10.4% of the total for Britain.  No details are given for the failures and no doubt many are due to economic climate, faulty business plans, market conditions, supply chain, vendor credit issues etc..  And while some of these problems might have nothing to do with IT, IT failures would not help.

I recall in the 70's installing what was at the time a state-of-the-art computer system at an East London delicatessen wholesaler.  It cost about £50,000 but the company owner had such a vast overdraft to smooth his cash flow that the system paid for itself in six months just because it was able to get invoices out the door PDQ.  The system then became so essential to the business that its failure would have caused the business to collapse.

So would some IT consultancy help you?  Maybe you've got it all covered and you’re comfortable with your set-up.  Well OK good no problem.  But before you exit just ask yourself the following:

• What would happen if my systems failed?
• Do I have a back-up strategy?
• Do I know where my data is?
• Do I have a disaster recovery plan?
• How quickly could I recover?
• What would it cost?
• If I get a problem to whom do I turn?
• Am I worried?

Just a few things to think about! 

A company I did some work for had their specialised computer software source code well backed-up on disks in off-site safes.  Good eh!  Well, inevitably, one day they needed to recover the data to make changes and retrieved the disks from the safe.  Great, until I advised them the disks were obsolete and there wasn't a hardware reader around that would access the data!  Lesson one!

If there is anything I can help you with then please contact me.

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