Disasters happen every day, and they have the potential to derail production and operations. If you face downtime due to inclement weather, a cyber attack, or any other disruption, you must activate your business continuity plan. What it might not contain is how to print and mail regulated customer communications. You can address this with disaster recovery print services.
What Are Disaster Recovery Print Services?
Disaster recovery print services describe business continuity solutions to ensure transactional communications continue to be produced. You’ll contract with a company to assume your processes should you be unable to do so.
There are multiple structures for these offerings. Understanding the limitations and scope helps you make the best decisions.
How Do Disaster Recovery Print Solutions Strengthen Business Continuity?
The objective of business continuity is to keep it running, despite disasters, disruptions, or downtime. Companies have to look across all their operations and define policies for each to achieve continuity.
They may look to many organizations for support with this. Finding specialized services like disaster recovery printing can be cumbersome. Also, most vendors in the space don’t look at this with a modern lens.
They still cling to obsolete models with “cold” backups. In these situations, you’re simply renting capacity from a vendor who isn’t familiar with your work. If this is your only option, you may have a huge gap in continuity for these tasks.
That’s been the standard for decades, but a new option is emerging that’s more comprehensive. In this framework, your provider isn’t your backup. They know your jobs because they produce a fraction of them regularly. You request they take over, and it’s nearly immediate and available 24-7.
What Are the Different Types of Disaster Recovery Print Services?
You can group these into two main categories: traditional and comprehensive. Here’s how they differ:
- Annual fees: Traditional requires them; comprehensive does not.
- Subscription costs: Traditional charges them; comprehensive does not.
- What’s covered: Traditional is only there in disaster scenarios. Comprehensive usually provides coverage for planned and unplanned downtime. It may also be a supplement when there are peak demands or labor shortages.
- Rates: Traditional disaster recovery approaches include costs for production, materials, click fees, and other expenses. The more modern option has competitive rates that are inclusive.
- Manufacturing environments: Most traditional providers have more than one facility, but they usually are not redundant and may not have consistency across operations. The comprehensive package has true redundancy and uniformity.
What’s the Difference Between Cold Sites and Working with a Provider Regularly?
In many disaster recovery offerings, your work goes to a cold site. It’s “cold” because there’s no instant handoff. The print and mail company doesn’t have a structure in place to understand your workflows and requirements.
Since they are starting from scratch, there can be delays as well as concerns about compliance, accuracy, and quality. Errors may increase, or you could fall behind on meeting dates.
The alternative is to allow your disaster recovery services partner to produce a portion of your communications monthly. That work can rotate across all the different letters you send, so they have knowledge around each one. They then know your processes and preferences. Should a disaster occur, they can immediately begin production.
These two frameworks present different outcomes. With cold sites, you face considerable risks. Whereas printers that know your business and needs can take over without missing a beat.
ACTIV dR: Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Print
PCI Group created ACTIV dR to rewrite disaster recovery print services. All the attributes described in the comparison earlier represent ACTIV dR solutions. When working with us, you’re protected from any disasters and can transition production to us immediately.
Want to learn more? Request a consultation with our team.
