Preparing For A Storm: Why Your Business Needs A Disaster Recovery Plan

 

Does your business have a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) provider, or at least some sort of disaster recovery plan?

Do you, the leader of your IT team, have a solid understanding of what BDR even means?

Whether you answered “no” or “yes” to these questions, it is important to review what’s at stake.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration 25% of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster.
Additionally, the Disaster Recovery Preparedness 2014 Benchmark Report, ActualTech Media and Infrascale’s 2015 DRaaS Attitudes & Adoption Report, and IDG’s recent study, Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Emerging as Top IT Priority, the average cost of down-time for SMB’s was $8,000 per hour, and the average amount of time it takes for a small business to recover after a disaster was 18 hours.

These are staggering statistics!

36% of businesses claim that they know they need a BDR plan, but they don’t think they can afford it. Well, consider this: Can your business afford the kind of operational and financial disruption mentioned above?

BDR: Let’s define it.

BDR stands for Backup and Disaster Recovery, the plan for recovery in the event of a catastophic event. Most people understand the concept, but what is less understood is how to achieve this.

What is a catastophic event? Simply put, a catastrophic event occurs when your company’s physical server is broken (or destroyed), or your digital data is lost, and your business is unable to function.  This could be caused by a variety of reasons, whether it be natural disaster, virus/malware, hardware failures, or even human error.

Even in the event you have a good backup of your company’s data, a catastrophic event can be very costly for a business.  Think about loss of productivity, loss of communication with customers, even reputation loss.

Protecting something precious

Imagine one day you’re in a horrible accident that leaves you unable to provide for yourself or loved ones.

Now imagine the outcomes of those situation depending on if you have insurance to cover being incapacitated. The future looks brighter if you have insurance!

Now apply that to your business. Imagine losing all of your data, but having a BDR plan to help you get back on your feet. If you don’t have that layer of protection, your business will essentially be incapacitated.

There’s no perfect way to plan for the future, but you should do everything to protect the business you’ve built.

There are many approaches to BDR and every business is unique. Outsourced IT providers and especially Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have expertise to tailor a solution to meet the requirements of your business. Most MSPs will implement, monitor and manage the solution for you.

Can your business live through a data loss?

Without a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan your business may be left crippled in the face of a calamity. How quickly your organization can bounce back depends on your commitment to emergency planning TODAY.
Get in touch with us to get started- we will review what you have in place and get the ball rolling from there.