One of the things we are quite proud of here at CSI despite the numerous network down stories over the years (many of them gruesome) we have never had a client miss a payroll. A business official's worst nightmare is not that the network is down. It is that they might miss payroll. We have our stories such as Evan working all night finishing at 4 am to make payroll but we'd rather not be working at 4 am if at all possible.
Here are a couple of items to consider in trying to prepare for this worst-case scenario:
- Know where your payroll is being done. Is it in-house? Is it at the RIC? You may think that is a stupid question, but I have been in situations where the technical staff has told me and their business official one thing and we, in fact, found out it was something completely different!
- If your payroll is off-site such as the RIC, know what your DR payroll plan is. Worst case is probably driving to the RIC and processing it there.
- If you do your payroll in-district, what servers are required to make payroll run?
- Do the internal payroll server(s) have redundancy at a DR site either in-district or at BOCES or the RIC?
- How is your payroll backed up? Locally to disk, via a remote backup service such as BOCES' CommVault service? Is it backed up locally to Veeam?
- If the payroll server was dead, or the underlying virtual server was dead, do you have the means to recover it someplace else (i.e. other equipment in-district, or at BOCES or the RIC)?
- One item that can make a lot of difference in a crisis is that despite our love of DHCP static reservations for our devices, from a DR perspective you probably want to appropriately hard code key workstations and printers so they can function as long as the network is physically turned on despite core DHCP/DNS servers, etc. being off.
If you'd like some help thinking this through, give us a call.
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