While many business owners may think a disaster is a flood, bushfire or earthquake they should realise a disaster is any event that prevents their business from accessing the data and systems it needs to operate. Your list of major disasters should include regional power outages, cyberattacks, employee sabotage or even hardware failure.
Research shows only 35% of small and medium sized enterprises have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place.
No business is immune to IT disasters, but a speedy recovery due to a well-crafted IT Disaster Recovery Plan can not only safeguard your business but give you peace of mind.
If you haven't thought about developing an IT DisasterRecovery Plan yet, it should be at the top of your priority list.
Five reasons you need a Disaster Recovery Plan
Machines and hardware failure
While society has made tremendous strides in the reliance of our technology, it’s still not perfect. You can buy the best equipment on the market, but that does not safeguard you from malfunctions, lemons and breaks.
Although modern IT hardware is relatively resistant to failures, this does not guarantee a perfect track record. No one is immune to internet connection or hardware failures.
Best practice would be to backup your data regularly, ideally with offsite storage. Regular testing to ensure backups are functional ensures that data can be recovered whilst your backups should be set-up and managed so that a backup failure does not result in loss of data.
The ideal solution (which would be more cost-effective than building a private top-of-the-line data centre) would be to outsource your IT infrastructure to a leading managed IT services and data centre operator who specialises in Disaster Recovery.
To address data security and connections, you need to introduce redundancy services and failovers. Doing so would ensure the strictest protection from service interruptions due to IT infrastructure failures.
People make mistakes
Much like machines, people are not perfect – they make mistakes. Have you ever forgotten to regularly save a file and lost hours of work due to an application crashing, or saved over another document accidentally?
As much as we wish we were, people are not perfect and can easily overlook an important step in a process and enter incorrect data or worse yet, accidentally delete data.
Ensuring you have efficient processes in place, with good quality assurance programs, is your best bet. However having an online backup solution can be as equally important.
A Disaster Recovery Plan that creates a series of incremental online data backups will enable you to quickly restore your files to an error-free state.
Prevent security breaches by having redundant firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-spyware software.
Nature is unpredictable
Flooding, bushfires and storms can not only threaten your physical premises but destroy your business.
Organisations that don’t have a backup and Disaster Recovery Plan in place can find it almost impossible to resume operations after major disaster hits.
Every business out there is susceptible to an IT disaster, and the only way to ensure that your business mitigates its interruptions is to have fast recovery due to a well-crafted backup and Disaster Recovery Plan.
You can’t afford downtime
Downtime and lost data can ruin your business’s reputation and brand as well as diminish trust which can result in lost revenue. Too many businesses are ill-prepared for when an IT disaster strikes.
Downtime means a lack of availability to your customers and a loss of business in the immediate and possibly long-term.
The Internet has not only forced companies to be more transparent and accountable, but competition in all industries has significantly increased.
The average consumer now expects that the information they’re looking for will be available whenever they want it. Meaning that if your organisation is having computer issues and cannot get up and running in a timely fashion, these impatient customers could jump ship to a competitor.
Most customers demand perfection because they know that if your company can’t provide it, the next competitor in line is ready to take that customer from you. Don’t give your customers a reason to leave because of something preventable such as an outage in service.
When a website goes down, online shoppers aren’t willing to wait for it to come back online (especially as they don’t know how long that will take). If you aren’t protecting your online presence and your network, you leave the door wide open for your competitors.
Save valuable time
If a disaster should occur, having a pre-prepared Disaster Recovery Plan can save your business months or even years of recovery. Think about your business. How important is it that you avoid downtime due to IT issues?
Businesses change, and so do the people who work within them. If you have a new CIO or IT Manager starting at your company, how do you expect them to be able to properly handle an unexpected disaster without a company-approved plan in place?
In reality, we cannot simply hope that new employees have the skills to handle a disaster. Having an easily implemented Disaster Recovery Plan may make the difference between getting up and running quickly or struggling to do so.
There is no excuse for not having a Disaster Recovery Plan in place.
