Mikinton
Well-Known Forumite
I'm sure their key systems will be up and running within hours. Many of the lower priority ones will take longer for a variety of reasons, the availability of technical and human resources being one of them. It depends what systems they run themselves and which of their own systems are under threat. Social Care will be very near the top as there are lives at risk. Email will be up there too. CRM and SRM are less important; whilst it's important to pay creditors and receive payments, there are ways round it in an emergency. Payroll? It depends on the cycle. If the pay date is weeks away, then you've got some breathing space. If it's tomorrow, you might have to tell the bank to pay them what you paid them last month and sort out the mess later. Corporate accounting may not be in itself be that important, but as it tends to bind everything else together, it'll be restored with the rest of the financials. And of course you need staff to go through their checklists to make sure it's all gone back OK, which takes hours even when you know what changes have been made to a system. Getting the website up will be important politically, and probably a quick win. Libraries may have to resort to manual procedures for while and may suspend them all together (good news if your library book is overdue). And last of all is the IT department's time recording system - how are they going to cost up all that overtime?Lincolnshire CC are "hoping" that their systems will be up and running next week..... really? You're backups weren't of a type that could be restored in literally just hours??? Shame on you.
<end of rant>
The problem is not that a system can't be restored within hours. It's just that there are so many of them all wanting the same technical resources at the same time. DR will have been taken seriously (one hopes), but at the end of the day, it's not like a bank and there's not the urgency to get everything back a.s.a.p. They'll understand the risks and will have a cost effective [strategy] in place .... one hopes.
Last edited: