Critical Reasons Why Connecticut Organizations Need Disaster Recovery Planning
Many businesses consider a cyber attack as their number one threat to their business, yet this is not the only thing that can threaten business continuity. What if your business was subject to flooding or engulfed in flames, the food or fire can wipe out your business in a heartbeat. If your network systems crashed, what would the impact on your business be?
If any disaster like this hit your business, your employees, vendors, and customers would want an answer because any major disruption to business affects them all.
More than half the companies in the world don’t have a business continuity plan to combat COVID-19. Yet a smart business would be prepared for such disasters with a carefully crafted Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP).
What Is Disaster Recovery Planning?
A DRP is essentially a business plan that outlines how a business will operate in the event of a disaster. A good DRP forms part of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and describes how work can be resumed quickly and efficiently in the event of a disaster.
The creation of a DRP usually begins with senior management support and approval and includes a business impact analysis (BIA) to determine the business functions that are most critical to the business. It usually involved a plan that allows the IT department to recover enough data and functionality to allow the business to operate even at a reduced level.
Disasters Can Affect Business Continuity
Because of heavy reliance on technology, most businesses tend to think that if the internet goes down or the business is hacked, this becomes a disaster. While these scenarios can be disastrous, there are many aspects to business continuity planning that must be considered in the context of developing a DRP.
Natural Disasters
Certain areas throughout the United States are prone to hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornados. These are the kinds of disasters that can wipe out a business and the ongoing effects can be felt for weeks, months, and even years without a comprehensive DRP.
Excessive rain can cause flooding, hail, and freezing weather can cause pipes to burst lightning strikes can cause fires. In the event of high winds and tornados when cars, trees, and other debris are flying around, buildings are not necessarily safe from damage or destruction.
System Failures
When you think of systems, it isn’t always about information technology. Any failure or outages in the electrical system can affect parts of a business operation. Breakdowns in the HVAC system, transformer failures, disruptions to gas services, pipe leaks, explosions, and elevator malfunctions can all have a negative effect on business operations.
Fires
When a fire strikes at night, it can completely ruin a business and if they strike in the daytime they can burn, injure, or even kill people. A lunchroom coffee pot, microwave, faulty electrical equipment, and other devices can all fail and cause fires.
Interior Flooding
In the event of any sudden and accidental release of water from a broken or frozen pipe, condensate lines, toilets and hand basins can stop business in its tracks. Flooding can ruin important records, documents, books, and manuals completely disrupting a business. It’s not always easy to dry out and recover paper documents and files which means unless you have an electronic version stored in the cloud, you may lose vital information and data pertaining to the business.
A DRP Brings Cost Savings And Other Benefits
Any disruption to business operations has a financial impact therefore it makes sense that a comprehensive DRP delivers long term cost savings. A good DRP will include preventive measures to reduce any associated risks of man-made disasters. Of course, because all businesses rely heavily on technology, it’s more critical than ever to ensure that disaster recovery planning incorporates the need to not only protect yourself against natural disasters, you need to protect your business against a major cyber attack and malicious malware.
Preventative measures spot unwanted activities as an overarching risk management strategy allowing a business to be proactive in the prevention of man-made disasters and cyber attacks. Taking corrective action can quickly restore lost data, enabling you to resume business as usual very quickly.
Preventive measures must include providing an impenetrable layer of security around your IT network to defend yourself against cyber attacks to protect your most sensitive data.
In the event of a disaster or major disruption to a business, being prepared not only realizes cost savings by averting potential disasters, if one does occur because you are able to respond quickly, this automatically reduces the overall financial impact.
With ongoing education and training, employees will know what to do in the event of a disaster allowing them to respond quickly and effectively. When you assign specific roles and action steps in advance, you will find employees get back to their roles quickly giving them a sense of security around their jobs knowing that everything is under control.
Greater Customer Retention
Your customers won’t always respond well when faced with a disruption to your business. They want what they want now! In the competitive world of business, business continuity is the key to retaining your customer base. When you can’t meet the needs of your customers you risk them doing business with a competitor. A DRP allows you to still serve your customers if ever faced with an unpredictable event.
Scalability
When preparing a DRP, the one thing that comes out of scenario planning on how to get your business back up and running quickly is you will identify innovative solutions.
For instance, with cloud storage, you will always be assured your data is kept safe and secure. Cloud technology negates the need to manually back up your data, it simplifies the process of archive maintenance and gives you peace of mind knowing your data is always backed up. Ultimately cloud technology and disaster planning mean you can streamline processes, eliminate superfluous hardware, and reduce any risk of human error.
Ultimately this means you stay in business in the event of a disaster. You can easily scale your business operation accordingly as cloud technology means your people can work from anywhere.
The team at Realized Solutions understands how your technology is closely intertwined with business continuity and disaster recovery. Protecting your network through a well-defined defense-in-depth strategy that includes firewalls, antivirus solutions, anti-malware, as well as robust backup and disaster recovery policies, means we can help keep you in business in the event of any disruption.
As the premier IT company in Connecticut, we are focused on you. Contact our Southington, CT office at (860) 410-0670, or reach us via email to [email protected] to schedule your complimentary initial consultation to ensure you are protected in the event of a disaster.
