That's one of the questions I find myself frequently discussing with the pharmaceutical businesses that I work with.
With technology now embedded intrinsically in almost every element of a pharmaceuticals business operations, network resilience, backups and disaster recovery plans have never been more important. And as anyone who has experienced network downtime will know, it is amazing how crippling an IT system failure is to the business.
From lost revenue, to lost employee productivity, the costs rapidly mount up while your system is down, your employees are idle and your customers potentially cannot contact you. It’s therefore worth spending a little time considering what would happen if your system does go down:-
• How much money will you lose?
• What’s the reputational damage?
• What are the Compliance implications?
• How long will it take to get your system up and running again?
• How much data or email will be lost?
• How will you operate your business in the meantime?
If you are unclear to the answers of any of these questions, then I would strongly advise that you take stock of your processes and procedures around network resilience, systems monitoring and disaster recovery, as my experience is that a little time and wise investment spent before something goes wrong can save your company a fortune – in fact it can sometimes just save your company!
Not only does IT system downtime lead to lost productivity and lost revenue, but the reputational damage it can cause can be immeasurable. And in the heavily regulated pharmaceuticals industry, the compliance implications can be catastrophic.
Over coming blogs, and because I wanted to expel some myths around system availability, I will be exploring some issues around downtime in pharmaceuticals. In these future blogs I will explore, discuss and advise on many of these myths, the likes of which include:-
1. “Well that won't happen to us”!
2. “We have a disaster recovery plan so we're fine!”
3. “Our systems are in the cloud so we don't need to worry about resilience or disaster recovery”
4. “Sophisticated network resilience and disaster recovery solutions cost a fortune”
However if in the meantime you have any questions or need some assistance with making your IT systems resilient, implementing systems monitoring or reviewing your disaster recovery arrangements, then please do not hesitate to contact me on 01494 444065 or email gary.swanwick@epoq-it.co.uk
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