Few recruitment businesses can function without their systems up and running. It isn’t just about the protection against a potential disaster, a malicious attack, or a catastrophic error that is important, it’s the action plan for getting back up and running as quickly as possible. Speed of recovery can make a huge difference. Take too long and your agency could quickly lose money and clients, and bad experiences can lead to potentially reputational damage.
One of the advantages of moving business systems and software into the cloud is that the IT headaches associated with back-up and recovery planning are simply removed.
What’s more, the cloud is the simplest and most effective way to deal with crucial problems.
The dangers of back-ups
Where does your recruitment agency currently back-up to? Whilst a local back-up might be a cheaper option it has limitations, not least the fact that a disaster which impacts your on-site systems can potentially impact your back-up when that’s held on site too. Some businesses choose to back up manually on site and then occasionally store a copy securely elsewhere. Although a cost-effective approach it severely limits how up-to-date the data held would be if it had to be called upon to get systems back up and running again after a major outage.
Rather than a local back-up, a more robust option is to set up a duplicate system at a second separate location. If your recruitment business has multiple branches this can be a viable choice, however the biggest issue is cost. A duplicate site with duplicate servers and back-up protocols requires serious investment, including in the ongoing resources needed to keep both running at all times.
Being able to recover
It’s common for businesses to back-up once a day, but if disaster strikes a few hours after the last back-up happened, then a significant amount of your client, candidate and business data would be lost. If this then takes hours or even days to get systems back up and running, you still have to allow for the time required to upload all the information from the back-up.
When time is of the essence, the cloud is faster and more effective. A cloud-based disaster recovery service (DRaaS) is the ‘gold standard’ because it provides the opportunity to get up and running in minutes. DRaaS creates a secure ‘mirror’ of your systems in the cloud at frequent intervals. Because this includes your infrastructure, not just your data, you can simply log on and run systems directly from the cloud rather than waiting for the physical recovery to take place.
When effective on-premise back-up and disaster recovery requires such a significant investment in time, resources and money, it makes sense to move to the cloud. Not only will moving your recruitment business to the cloud provide a good value and effective solution for these issues – it also opens up a whole world of other business benefits.
Unsurprisingly, given the need to quickly switch to remote working, we’re helping many recruitment agencies who are using an on-premise recruitment software to migrate to the cloud right now. Fortunately, we can get consultants up and running in matter of days, with minimal downtime – all supported by remote training and online support.
One of our long-standing clients, Morgan Hunt moved their entire workforce to remote working in two days after migrating all of their on-premise hardware onto our cloud last year. At the time they were looking for a more scalable, flexible and secure platform to serve their 180 UK-based users but in light of recent events it put into sharp perspective just how essential it is to have the right technology in place, with robust support and expertise. A representative from Morgan Hunt recently commented “We were fully mobilised within 36 hours. I dread to think what the situation would have been last March as we were not on the Access Cloud platform.” See what else Morgan Hunt had to say.
