In today’s tech-centric business atmosphere, your company’s data is most likely one of the most precious and valuable resources you own. Losing this data can be very detrimental to your operations, and it can negatively affect the functionality of multiple departments if you have a larger operation. Data loss can mean a hit to your inventory management, communications, customer relations, transaction processing, and much more. You may be facing lost revenue, lost customers, diminished productivity, and other serious issues for a business.
Because of these risks, it is more than worthwhile to put time and money into creating a disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery plans include everything from cloud-based backup servers to planned procedures for restoring data and functionality. In this article, we’ll talk about what a data loss disaster might look like, and what a disaster recovery plan can do for you. Finally, we’ll provide a summary of the best practices for a disaster recovery plan, so you’re ready in case your company is hit.
Disaster Around the Corner
So what kind of risks are businesses looking at? One disaster recovery survey indicated that the most common causes of disasters were hardware failure, power failure, and data corruption. Though natural disasters and other catastrophic failures can pose terrifying challenges to affected businesses, really the most serious economic threats come from mundane technical failures, which are disturbingly common and can happen at any time without warning.
It is a complex task to keep your IT infrastructure running, and every business is going to have to deal with some type of hardware failure at a certain point in time. Further, local power grids operate outside of your control, so if your business is located near a strained power grid, a serious outage could pose quite a problem. Implementing disaster recovery plans and best practices can help to mitigate these risks, and lower potential costs in case disaster strikes.
Though technical failures and data breaches are the most common causes of disaster, a business still has to contend with natural disasters, depending on location. Natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornados, lightning strikes, and fires all pose problems for continuity. Further, some companies do deal with general system downtime, as well as employee error or sabotage. There is a long list of possible disaster scenarios for any given business.
With the compound costs that are incurred from losing business functionality, suffering downtime, losing out on revenue, losing customers, regaining customers, and spending valuable man hours on damage control, you can see that plenty is at stake here. Creating a disaster recovery plan is a no-brainer.
What a Recovery Plan Can Achieve
According to the European Disaster Recovery Survey, 74 percent of European companies were not confident that they’d be able to recover their data in a disaster, and 54 percent of companies ended up losing data or suffering systems downtime in the course of their operation. After witnessing the costs incurred after such data loss and downtime, 44 percent of companies decided to update their backup and recovery procedures, and 27 percent even chose to increase their spending on backup solutions.
As you can see, many businesses are feeling the sting of disaster, and are taking steps to protect themselves. What exactly can a recovery plan do for you?
Of course, disaster recovery plans aren’t perfect. If you get hit by a disaster you’re still going to be scrambling to put your business back together. However, with all of your data backed up and procedures in place to get up and running again in an orderly fashion, you’re much less likely to suffer serious losses. Disaster recovery plans and their best practices are designed to put your business back together step by step and on solid footing, so you won’t have to worry about the chaos, disorder, and panic that comes to companies without a plan.
With a disaster plan in place, you can get back in business fast after a disaster hits, and you’ll suffer much less in productivity loss and foregone revenue. Your customers will be relieved when you come back online so fast, inspiring confidence in your business.
Best Practices for a Disaster Recovery Plan
Creating a disaster recovery plan is pretty easy to do, thanks to the advances in information and Internet technology. There are companies out there that offer excellent disaster recovery services, such as cloud-based data backup and restoration protocols.
Above all else, a good disaster recovery plan means backing up your data, which is very valuable. Consider backing up your data to a secure location, and having redundancies such as multiple backup locations to insure against failure. Keep a schedule of regular backups, and make sure to archive all of your backups.
You should be regularly monitoring your servers, and you should readily have all of the software and updates you need in case anything happens. Keep thorough records of your hardware and software changes.
It helps to regularly verify the integrity of your backups, as sometimes even your backups can suffer from errors and corruption. Do test restores, and make sure everything is working smoothly. It is also a good idea to have spare hardware in hand in case you have any failures.
Finally, you should have your staff fully trained on disaster readiness and recovery procedures. If anything does happen, your employees will know exactly what to do and there will be less chaos in the recovery period.
Disaster Recovery For Your Company
A disaster can come in many different forms. Whether your power is knocked out by a lightning storm or you suffer a routine hardware or software failure, you need to be prepared to restore your business to full functionality and recovery your data. Otherwise, you risk losing revenue, productivity, and customers.
Creating a disaster recovery plan is the least you can do to ensure that your business is ready for the worst. If you follow these basic best practices for a disaster recovery plan, you’ll be better prepared than most businesses operating now. Today there are professionals in the field that you can outsource your disaster preparedness to without having to worry about the IT and infrastructure required for the task. NIC features top-notch disaster recovery services with cutting-edge backup data servers and other crucial servers. Give us a call at 1-877-721-3330 and get started today.
