A Business Continuity Guide to Disaster Recovery in the Workplace

Our world has changed drastically in the last few months, with the Coronavirus pandemic turning the way we live and work upside-down. But what happens when unexpected events such as these force your office to close? How can you prepare for such things, if at all?

Disasters are often associated with catastrophic events such as earthquakes or a hurricane, but incidents such as cyber-attacks, equipment failures, terrorism and, as we have seen in the past few months, global pandemics can be classified as disasters.  

Workplace disaster recovery is a key part of ensuring business continuity but how should we go about tackling it?

What is disaster recovery?

Companies prepare for such unexpected events by creating a disaster recovery plan that details actions to take and processes to follow to ensure business continuity and minimise disruption. A large part of the disaster recovery plan revolves around IT, however workplace recovery also forms an important part of the plan - where will your staff work from if the office is no longer an option, will there be a rotation strategy in place?

Why is workplace recovery important?

From a strictly workplace recovery perspective, business continuity is vital and there is a selection of providers able to offer a range of different options to ensure you have an office set-up and ready should the unexpected happen. There are different types of packages available depending on how much space you need and how quickly you might need it.

There is the option of a dedicated back-up space, whereby it is available immediately should you need it or a more dynamic option, whereby it is available within 24 hours. Some providers are able to offer this across their global portfolio, but for many it is limited to specific regions and/or cities.  

The question for most businesses is what size should the disaster recovery space be? The improvement in technology and broadband in many countries and subsequent rise of flexible working means many employees could work from home for a period of time if needed. Businesses set-up to enable staff to work from anywhere are therefore well placed when it comes to needing disaster recovery space. They might only need a smaller allocation of space, for example if they were 2,000 staff in an office, they might allocate 10% of staff as those that require dedicated office space in the event the office is out of use. The smaller allocation enables them to be more flexible with what space they choose. But clearly this allocation depends on the set-up and infrastructure of your business, and many businesses still need a large portion of their staff to be based at the office, and therefore require a much higher portion of workplace recovery space.

Most companies have workplace recovery either in the form of leases or in the form of a contract with service providers such as IWG or WeWork. A recent example of the latter being Goldman Sachs business continuity space with WeWork in the City of London.

There is no hard and fast rule as to how you might structure your workplace recovery strategy, and much of it will depend on you individual business needs. But being as prepared as possible for the unexpected is incredibly important in the modern world. This is all about having clear processes in place should the unexpected happen, so that if disaster does strike, there is a clear plan of action to avoid as much disruption as possible to your business.

Workthere helps companies with their disaster recovery workplace plan. We start by understanding how the business and employees work today and then focus on what the recovery requirement might be. Our global network of local experts allows us to help businesses locally and globally with their strategy.