Tender Writing Continuity

We moved to a larger office this weekend (second time in ten months) As specialist tender writers our timing had to be exact. The nature of PQQ and tender writing means that we always have a deadline looming, usually half a dozen and so there is no good time to move. IT is everything to us and so we planned meticulously, what could go wrong?

It is not just tender writers though; IT systems are becoming increasingly critical for the continued smooth operation of an organisation, or even the economy as a whole. It is hugely important to make sure that these systems continue to operate in the event of a disaster or planned or unplanned event. Many larger companies can spend up to 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning, with the idea in mind that this will prevent larger costs in the future, such as the company as a whole not being able to continue to operate due to a loss of IT infrastructure and data. Statistics show that, out of companies that experience a severe loss of IT, 43% will never reopen and 51% will end up closing inside the following two years. Only 6% are shown to survive in the long term, so this shows just how important it is to plan and plan again for the possible event of a disaster, even if it is for something as small as moving offices!

There are 3 types of control measures that you should be aware of for disaster recovery:

1. Preventative measures – controls aimed at preventing an event or disaster from happening in the first place

2. Detective measures – these are put in place in order to detect or discover any unwanted events that may disrupt your business

3. Corrective measures – these are controls that are put in place that aim to correct or restore an IT system after an event or disaster

At Executive Compass we are completely IT based, all of the work we do when completing a PQQ and writing a bid requires the use of a computer for word processing, e-mail and template design. In the event of a disaster it is essential that we have control measures in place in order to facilitate the continued operations of our business. We moved into a new office at the end of last week (hurray!), and as part of the big move we also took the opportunity to upgrade some of our hardware, with new desktop PCs with higher specs needed for compiling larger tender documents. If we did not have the control measures we have in place, then this could and would have seriously affected the continued smooth operation of our business.

We use a variety of backup programs including those we have had specifically designed for the job. These can be described as both a preventive and corrective control measure. We use them for all of our clients’ documents and this proved unbelievably useful during the move. All of work is stored on the specialist servers and once we had the new hardware set up all we had to do was install this onto the new machines and it began to synch back up with all the other desktop units. We have also made use of UPSs (uninterruptable power supplies), which protect all of our machines against surges and power cuts. The USP can power a machine in the event of power disruption, so if we wanted to we could have even continued to work on our computers whilst they were being moved from our old office to the new one! We also all use company mobile phones that have proved immensely useful during the move as there was a small latency between our old phone lines being deactivated and our new phone line being turned on. We were also able to use our phones as a temporary modem for our computers whilst the internet was being switched over so our operations were never truly interrupted at all.

We have also kept hold of our old hardware, so that in the event of any of our new machines failing we will still have these to continue to work on.