Certified public accountants (CPAs) and tax-preparation firms all over the country are racing against the clock to meet income tax deadlines for their clients. Tax professionals have already filed more than 27.3 million returns this year, and of those about 96 percent have been filed electronically, according to reports from AccountingWeb. For tax professionals during tax season, no two words evoke more dread than “system downtime.”

Now in their busiest time of the year, tax firms cannot afford any interruptions to their business operations, especially those caused by IT system failures, which can result in hours of downtime and the loss of business-critical tax preparation applications. Whether caused by power outage or software glitch, downtime is more than an inconvenience – it’s a completely preventable source of lost profits and enormous employee frustration. Interruptions of any length to business operations during this critical time can mean unhappy clients, a tarnished reputation and chaos.

All too often it’s believed that IT downtime is some combination of bad luck and the nature of IT systems; maybe the bad luck is true, but eliminating downtime of complex IT systems is a solved problem. Today, there’s no reason for any organization to accept IT downtime.

Plan ahead

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The best defense against IT downtime is to have a solid business continuity plan in place that ensures maximum uptime even in the face of disaster.

A good business continuity plan will include:

• Analysis of what the critical IT systems are

• How long IT systems can be down before the business is impacted

• How quickly the system must be brought back up

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Remember, the business continuity plan is a living document. That means, testing your plan regularly will help you evaluate how reliable it will be if you have to respond to an incident or crisis. You can then update it with any improvements. Your business continuity plan should be updated at least once a year. You will also need to update it whenever there are changes in your business, such as the location you operate in.

Find the right solution

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With a good continuity plan in place, highlighting the basic information needed, tax and accounting firms can assess what recovery technology is needed. For example, many CPAs and tax-preparation firms turn to tape, disk, or cloud backup to protect against system downtime.

This approach is all about being able to recover the data, but does not address the need for recovering servers and applications to process that data. Especially in the case where there is an urgent need to process the data (such as tax deadlines), a “data-backup-only” approach does not address the need to be back up and running quickly. If the business continuity plan requires a critical system to be back up in minutes (or hours), a data-backup-only strategy will never meet those objectives.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) — and specifically hybrid cloud solutions — on the other hand, are popular emerging trends for when the business continuity plan requires instant system recovery. Perfect for midmarket businesses that can’t afford or don’t want to maintain a colocation site, the best of these solutions go beyond simple backup and recovery to actually restore data, applications and systems in a single step. They take incremental snapshots of servers so that archives are constantly updated and assets such as tax-preparation applications are instantly restored. Better yet, some even offer on-demand and automatic testing, which, when performed regularly, is paramount in reducing instances of system downtime.

Tax professionals that require maximum uptime (in theory, everyone) can find peace of mind in knowing their disaster recovery options are more than just recovering data, but now also include getting instant recovery of the entire system.

Test, test, test. And test again

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A recent survey revealed that only 28 percent of small to mid-sized businesses test regularly, which means that the majority of these organizations are “playing chicken” with system downtime. Regular testing can reveal any number of changes to a company’s network — changes that could inhibit the recovery of not only data but also applications and systems should there be an unexpected IT failure. These changes can include added storage, new security patches, modified or removed applications. Backup corruption and human error add to the snags that are revealed with weekly testing, and can include tape corruption and incorrect setup of backups.

While testing in with tape or disk backup solutions is complex and cumbersome, automatic, on-demand testing afforded by a hybrid cloud solution offers a simpler alternative. With a proper plan, the right solution for your business and regular testing in place, surviving tax season unscathed can be a reality.

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About the Author

John Gallagher runs marketing for Quorum, leveraging 20+ years of expertise in product marketing, pipeline management, and thought leadership on innovative technologies. Across his work in storage and semiconductors, John has embraced the role of technology evangelist through forming industry associations, editorial viewpoints, and public speaking.

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