We have our own private cloud in a server farm in East London, which houses our backup servers and our primary command and control systems. We also have a variety of test servers in our offices, allowing us to try things out before going live with a new setting or program.
We also keep a selection of spare equipment in case of emergency at any of our clients, which we can grab on our way out the door. For some of our clients this even includes replacement servers of an identical specification to their own.
In the past our office has been used as an emergency server home for a client who had to move out of their offices before the new ones were ready, with all their staff connecting remotely from their homes for a few weeks, and we also have a couple of fire safes we can use for hard copies of clients’ off-site backups.
We do not try to be a “one stop shop” but instead have found a number of like-minded symbiotic businesses over the years that we can turn to for additional assistance. They, in turn, are experts in their fields, and they turn to use when their expertise is stretched towards ours.
But our main resource is our staff. The people we hire are engineers in the original sense of the word. Most “engineers” these days are really technicians. Our staff can build systems, troubleshoot complex problems, and routinely find bugs and problems in other peoples software. We actively contribute to the open source world where we can, in the knowledge it will make it better in the long run.