12-27-21 | Blog Post
Your IT department has plenty of things to accomplish every day that help keep your business running effectively. There are issues to troubleshoot, users to help, and equipment to install. In many cases, creating an effective disaster recovery plan is pushed to the bottom of your priority list. If you’ve been putting off preparing your disaster recovery plan, however, there are several reasons it should be made a top priority.
1. Your disaster recovery plan lets you get back to doing business faster in the event of a natural disaster, data breach, or other disaster. Your employees lose as much as 78% of their productivity during an outage–not to mention all the business you’re losing. By creating an effective disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, you’ll get your business up and running again faster, which means less money lost.
2. A disaster recovery plan lets everyone know what they’re supposed to be doing in the middle of a disaster. How will you take care of notifying customers that there’s a potential problem–the website is down, credit card data has been stolen, or a natural disaster has shut down your business? Who’s in charge of making sure that your employees know what’s expected of them immediately following the disaster? Who is in charge of taking steps to bring your system back up? When you have a disaster recovery plan in place, everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing. There’s no need for people to try to do the same tasks when you’ve created an efficient disaster recovery plan.
3. Your disaster recovery plan incorporates your data recovery plan. Anything, from a foolish employee error to a natural disaster that wipes out your facility, can lead to disaster when you don’t have a data backup system in place. When you have a good disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, you’ll be able to access your vital data in spite of disasters that could otherwise have prevented it. That means fewer lost records, lost customers, and wasted hours in re-entering or re-collecting data. Spending minor resources on data recovery plans now will make a big difference in your data recovery costs when disaster does hit.
4. Your disaster recovery plan will keep your business operating even if you can’t access your physical facility. Natural disasters and other problems can prevent you from accessing your facility entirely. Power outages can keep your equipment from running. When you have a great disaster recovery plan in place, however, you can keep your business operating as efficiently as possible even when you aren’t able to access the physical facility. You can’t control nature, and you probably can’t control the power company. What you can control is how your business reacts when things don’t go according to plan–and an effective disaster recovery plan will ensure that you’re able to get a move on.
5. You don’t want to lose customers in the event of a disaster. Customers expect perfection from your business. Every minute of downtime due to a disaster could be a dissatisfied customer who is unwilling to work with your business in the future. Customer re-acquisition is incredibly costly–and that’s when it can be done at all. When disaster strikes your business, your disaster recovery plan is the critical element that will keep customers from disappearing.
Disasters happen. Weather, electronic failures, and human error are often out of your control. If you’re ready to start drafting a disaster recovery plan that will keep your business running smoothly in spite of the potential disasters that could come your way, contact us to learn more about how we can help set your business up for success in spite of the circumstances.
