Up and Running FAQs

In addition to your monthly subscription, usage charges will apply should you need to activate your OfficeNOW service. Rather than incorporate a usage charge into the monthly fee across all customers, the monthly fee has been calculated based on an expectation that we will pass the ‘irregular and unforeseeable’ usage charges only on to customers who activate, ensuring that monthly charges for other customers can continue to be kept lower. These activation costs should be assessed against the cost of down-time, lost income, and erosion of goodwill as a result of a crisis event. Regular business insurances often incorporate provision for ‘additional cost of operating’ expense and therefore may pay any usage charges incurred.    

It is regular good business practice to build on-site redundancy of this type. However this is not a replacement for a robust off-site contingency arrangement. Nor does it remove the requirement for regularly testing and proving recovery of your servers from backup.

Buildings, telephone lines and computer servers are not simply ‘sitting on a warehouse shelf’ waiting to be collected. Equipment is often built-to-order.  

• Rebuilding and reinstalling servers cannot even begin until replacement servers are delivered.
• Remind yourself how long it takes to install infrastructure and resources from new – during a time of calm!
• A complete business infrastructure takes a minimum of 4 to 6 weeks to rebuild, even system failures regularly extend beyond the imagined ‘few hours’ into days and weeks. Plan-b eliminates the unknown timeframe delivering instead a tested and proven recovery.

   

This ‘gesture of goodwill’ is often made flippantly by staff or third parties and seldom written up as an agreement. In a crisis, staff and business partners stand willing to offer assistance, but without tested and proven access to off-site standby facilities they remain paralysed to assist. Plan-b displaces ‘best efforts’. Other important considerations that are often overlooked:

• The staff member/partner doesn’t substantiate the gesture of goodwill with a tested and proven plan.
• A supplier is unable to suspend its commitments and divert all resources to attend to your crisis. In doing so, the supplier will have created a crisis for themselves.
• Being an independent third party, Plan-b can provide an impartial view of the state of your backup practices.
• Plan-b tests and proves recovery from backup without the input of your IT integrator or internal IT staff, relieving you of the reliance of this single point of possible failure.
• Any time staff spend testing and proving recovery is time that could be better spent doing core activities.

 

Plan-b provides more than just a room. Plan-b is a contingency arrangement that provides not just workspace in a vacant state of readiness, but intelligence in the sense that information systems are recovered by Plan-b onto standby equipment while telephony and data communications equipment can be commandeered immediately with a minimum of down-time. Customers who have activated their Plan-b testify that they were promptly able to continue with business and service the needs of their customers.