Disaster Recovery- your most important Business Plan!
Ever had that feeling where you wish you had done something different…don’t let this happen in your business. You should be thinking about a disaster recovery planning. The recent floods in The North of England are a prime example- some lost power for two-three days, some people lost their entire businesses.
A 2014 survey by the IT Disaster Recovery Preparedness (DRP) Council reveals just how many companies worldwide are at risk: 73 percent of SMEs are failing in terms of disaster readiness. What does this mean? It means that 3 out of 4 companies aren’t prepared to handle emergencies and save their businesses from a worse-case scenario.
We hope this has never happened and will never happen to you, but to help you be a little more prepared here is some basic information on disaster recovery planning.
What is Disaster Recovery?
A way for your business to be able to restore and re-access all your data in the event of a disaster that destroys your businesses resources. DR is there is ensure that no matter what happens, your vital data can be recovered and business critical applications can be restored in the quickest time possible.
But disasters don’t often happen…
True, but business related disasters come in many forms. As mentioned previously the Northern Floods of December 2015 were natural, but they can also be technological or man-made. These kinds of disasters may involve hazardous material spills, a power outage, infrastructure failure, cyberattack, etc. etc. You can imagine the many different circumstances that can happen- more often than not these are out of your control. But DR isn’t.
Why Disaster Recovery?
Whatever the issues, or disaster that has happened, your business needs to be able to recover as quickly as possible, otherwise day to day operations may come to a halt.
Yes it may be time consuming but it is also extremely important to ensure your business’ survival. You need to be able to recover quickly in event of a disaster. Downtime will be the biggest IT expense you can face. Based on 2015 disaster recovery statistics, downtime that lasts for one hour can cost small companies as much as $8,000, mid-size organizations $74,000, and $700,000 for large enterprises.
Not only the cost of downtime but you could lose orders, increase your labour cost trying to work back downtime, and negatively impact cash flow through late invoicing. These could all have long-term implications on your business if data cannot be recovered easily- perhaps most importantly, your reputation could be damaged.
How do I create a DR plan for my business?
Creating, implementing and maintaining your businesses recovery plan can be time-consuming and being a smaller business you may not have the resource available. If you know this is something your business needs but need some help and guidance towards putting a plan together, give us a call and we can help to talk this through with you.
Call us on 01524 581 690, or email [email protected].
Providing IT Support in Lancaster, Preston and the North West, we are Q2Q!
