Phoenix launches Re:Cover – a business continuity lifeline for SMEs

As a direct response to the regional flooding, Phoenix, the leading provider of UK business continuity and disaster recovery services for the past 25 years, has brought forward the launch of Re:Cover, a new service aimed at SMEs. As part of the launch, Phoenix is also offering one year’s free Re:Cover service for those businesses taking out a disaster recovery service contract.

The recent storms and flooding have demonstrated that unpredictable and extreme weather patterns are here to stay. Yet the majority of UK small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are still unprepared, lacking a properly structured and regularly tested disaster recovery plan to ensure continuity of service for customers and ultimately the survival of their business.

Mike Osborne, managing director of business continuity at Phoenix, explains: “Business Continuity is now an essential modern business tool and not a capability reserved solely for government and larger corporations. In the last month alone the UK has seen renewed terrorist attacks, unprecedented flooding and an increase in cyber-attacks. In addition, the recent IT outage at Lloyds Bank highlighted the huge reputational impact and financial loss incurred even from a short-lived incident.”

The Re:Cover service from Phoenix provides comprehensive business continuity cover pre-packaged for the SME community. Under its umbrella, businesses benefit from cover for both catastrophic IT failure and loss of office facilities following a disaster such as a fire, flood, local police incident, or gas leak. In addition to this SMEs will also have access to additional Phoenix advisory services such as business continuity plan writing, incident management and IT recovery restore procedures.

Osborne continues: “Re:Cover makes use of Phoenix’s existing nationwide network of specialist business continuity centres. Based in 18 major UK cities these offer more than 8,000 permanently equipped office seats, call-centre and data centre facilities permanently on-standby for disaster use only. Customers covered by a Re:Cover policy also have data-backup in Phoenix’s secure cloud and access to IT servers and internet connectivity. Most customers can be back-up and running within 24 hour of a total loss”.

As part of its launch, Phoenix is offering one year’s free service to those organisations taking out a further three year service contract for Re:Cover before 30th June 2014.

Osborne concludes: ”A lot of small businesses have been affected by the floods. A lot more are either worried they may still be affected or relieved that they got away with it – this time.

“We already support more than 1,600 UK clients of all sizes but Re:Cover has been exclusively designed for the SME community providing an affordable service, that takes the complexity out of trying to understand where to get started with a business continuity plan and includes all the key elements needed for a credible and successful recovery. We believe this and the offer of a free year of cover, will come as a welcome relief to SMEs.”