12-27-21 | Blog Post

Why Your Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan

Blog Posts

You wouldn’t buy a car without buying insurance, so why would you have a business without a disaster recovery plan? Disaster Recovery is a crucial part of every company’s IT strategy, and without it you open yourself up to the potential of catastrophic data loss. If that isnt enough of a reason to ensure your company has a plan in place, here are a few more:

Threats are Real

Threats to your business’s data come in all shapes and sizes. From natural disasters to human error to cyber criminals.  Today, Ransomware is a top cyber threat that is wreaking havoc on IT systems. Preventative measures can only go so far when a disaster actually strikes, and companies should have plans in place to get their systems back online quickly.

The Cost of Downtime

Downtime can happen to any business, at any time, for any reason. For many companies, downtime means lost revenue. But the cost of downtime spans beyond monetary. Downtime can cost your business damage to its reputation and, as a result, loss of customers. In some cases, downtime can be life or death, like when a hospital experienced an extended outage of its Electronic Health Record.  The longer you are offline, the more damage your company will experience. Having a disaster recovery plan in place helps businesses to outline parameters for getting back online while reducing the overall impact of downtime. This can include having a failover plan to get up and running through a secondary site.

Data Security

The backbone of most companies is the data that they generate, collect and store. Thus, protecting this data should be a top priority. Having a disaster recovery plan in place helps businesses to avoid catastrophic data loss. By outlining strict regiments for the backup and recovery of data, a disaster recovery plan ensures that your data isn’t only safe from an attack or outage, it is handled securely.

Human Error

Disasters are not always natural or cyber related. Often times downtime can be caused by something as simple as human error. And while we can’t eradicate human error entirely, we can take steps to reduce it and ensure that recovery time is fast. By deploying a disaster recovery plan, companies can make sure that employees are all on the same page when it comes to handling a disaster. This can also help in mitigating the risk of a human error disaster from occurring.

The Bottom Line

Though we try our best to prepare and prevent the worst from happening, there are things that are out of our control. The best course of action is to have a plan in place to reduce the impact of a disaster on your business. Companies that do not have a disaster recovery plan in place often will never recover from the costs of downtime. Don’t put your business in that position. Find out more about how you can develop a DR plan.

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