In today’s digital world, we rely on our business technology more than ever. That’s why you should be doing everything you can to protect your data and technology. In order for your business to stay protected, you need a disaster recovery plan.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, one in five businesses doesn’t have a disaster recovery plan. That means that 20% of businesses would struggle to recover if they experienced a disaster. These disasters can range from storms and earthquakes to cyberattacks, network outages and human error. That’s why it’s so important that you have a plan in place for these scenarios.
Let’s discuss a few ways to prevent a disaster from impacting your business.
Four Simple Steps to Creating Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Step 1: Run a Business Impact Analysis
Run a business impact analysis on your current processes. This analysis is perfect for finding any gaps in your business. That way, when you see those vulnerabilities, you can get the information you need to create a disaster recovery strategy.
Step 2: Identify Your Critical Business Functions
Based on the results of your analysis, your next step should be to identify and document your critical business functions. With your analysis, you should now be able to see how your business would fare if it were hit by a disaster. From there, you can identify what parts of your business processes need to be improved.
Step 3: Begin Developing Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Now is when you start developing your disaster recovery plan. For your plan to be successful, you should organize your recovery teams, create points of contact in the event of a disaster, write the procedures needed in the event of a disaster and communicate these procedures with your entire team.
Step 4: Test Your Plan & Train Your Team
Finally, test how your disaster recovery plan works. Testing your plan with mock scenarios is crucial to make sure that everything is solid with no gaps. Once that’s figured out, it’s important that your team is trained on these procedures so that they’re also prepared if a disaster strikes.
Final Thoughts
A solid disaster recovery plan can give you peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and secure.
There can be many challenges to developing your own plan, and it can be a extremely time-consuming task. That’s where we come in — our experts can assess your IT infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities, address the gaps, develop a disaster recovery plan and test that plan for you. At Nitor Solutions, our IT experts are ready to help you develop a plan to keep your business data safe and backed up.
Looking to learn more about disaster recovery and other cyber tips? Check out more of our blogs in our resources section.
We all know how important our business data is in today’s digital world. We are creating and using tons of new data every day. In fact, according to Forbes, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every 24 hours. And much of this business data is essential to keeping your business running smoothly and successfully. So, there’s no debate that this data needs to stay protected. The question is – Do you have a process in place to manage and keep your data safe? And better yet, do you have a disaster recovery plan if something terrible happens?
Considering that cyberattacks only continue to increase, now is the perfect time to have a solid data recovery plan. This article will discuss the dangers of not having a plan and why you need one. No matter how big or small your business is, you must have a data backup and recovery plan to protect your most valuable assets. Without a plan, you may be putting your business on the line.
The Dangers of Not Having a Plan
When you don’t have a data recovery plan in place, you leave your business extremely vulnerable to scenarios that could impact the safety of your data. A classic example is a cyberattack, especially in the case of ransomware attacks. According to CompariTech, two in five SMBs have been victims of ransomware attacks. Without a data backup and recovery plan, when bad actors hack into your system, they now have access to all your data and can hold it for ransom.
Ransomware attacks are no longer an uncommon practice either. And the percentage of companies that survive them and get their data back is not very high. Sophos found that 46% of companies faced with an attack paid the ransom and only 4% of those that paid got their data back. With few positive outcomes from a ransomware attack, the simple solution is a data backup and recovery plan. But cyberattacks are only one primary concern facing small businesses.
Another one of the biggest dangers that any business faces is downtime. According to Forbes, 82% of companies have experienced at least one unplanned downtime incident over the last few years. And believe us, downtime is never cheap. Gartner found that the average cost of downtime was $5,600 per minute. That’s over $300,000 if your business experiences just an hour of downtime. With a data recovery plan, downtime is all but eliminated because your company always has access to your data.
Why Having a Data Backup & Recovery Plan is Critical
There are many reasons why having a data recovery plan is crucial to the livelihood of your business. As we mentioned before, the most obvious is that your data is valuable and can be easily lost during a cyberattack or system failure. Whether you lose your data to a bad actor or any other way, you always have a second copy of those files when your data is backed up. But stronger security is only part of the battle; there’s also compliance.
A data backup and recovery plan is critical to maintaining compliance standards. When your business properly keeps up with compliance standards, you’re helping yourself avoid costly fines. This is especially important if you work in a heavily regulated industry like finance, healthcare, government-related work or legal. For example, individual HIPAA violations can cost as much as $50,000 per violation, so you need to keep your data backed up for many reasons, including steep regulatory fines.
There are many other benefits to a disaster recovery plan beyond security and compliance. With a plan in place, you can save a lot of money just on how you operate. With a cloud management system, you can give everyone access to what they need in a scalable system that increases workplace productivity and worker satisfaction. You can support flexibility and empower your employees to do their best work with a cloud backup and recovery system and an IT infrastructure that delivers long-term cloud solutions that benefit your business and team.
At Nitor Solutions in North Carolina, we offer long-term plans that help make sure your data is secure. Whether you’re looking for basic cloud upgrades or an offsite data management solution, our IT experts are here 24/7 to help you with any of your business IT concerns.
Looking to learn more IT tips that your business could use? Check out our past blogs on cybersecurity and cloud solutions, or contact our team to continue the conversation.
