04-11-19 | References
We have all heard the horror stories of simple mistakes that lead to costly business disasters. It seems like every day on the news we hear about the next recall or outage that leads to the need for public relations to clean up the mess. More often than not, the damage is too great to overcome and the company that suffered the IT disaster can’t recover. Starting an IT disaster recovery plan is a critical business need.
Planning for the unknown can be difficult, and having enough funds to start an IT disaster recovery plan can seem close to impossible. But how unlikely is it that an IT disaster will happen to your company? With the combination of natural disasters, hardware failures, and human error, the reality is that data loss is only a matter of when, not if.
According to a NFIB National Small Business poll, man-made disasters affect 10 percent of all small businesses, and a staggering 30 percent have been impacted by natural disasters. A simple power outage could put your whole business at risk. In fact, research by the University of Texas has shown that only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, 43 percent never reopen and 51 percent close within two years.
Here are the top 5 reasons why your company should start an IT disaster recovery plan.
While modern IT hardware is fairly resistant to failures, most devices fall far short of a perfect track record. No one is immune to hard disk or internet connection failures. While it can be costly for your company to eliminate any single point of failure in your IT infrastructure, having a disaster recovery plan that does this is the only way to insure that a hardware failure doesn’t interrupt your service or cause data loss. The less expensive and more sensible option would be to have your data backed up regularly. Ideally, and more cost-effective than building your own top-of-the-line data center, would be to outsource your IT infrastructure to a leading Disaster Recovery as a Service managed data center operator. This eliminates any capital expenses while ensuring the strictest protection from service interruptions due to IT infrastructure failures.
Have you ever accidentally saved over a word document or had your computer crash before you could save an important file? It happens to the best of us. Even the most cautious can forget a step in an important process causing data loss or the wrong data to being entered. While very common, these mistakes can often be the hardest to prevent and correct. Having a disaster recovery plan that creates a series of incremental online data backups lets you easily restore your files to an error-free state. Having redundant firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-spyware software can ensure that security breaches are protected against if one were accidentally disabled or a port left open. Often times the most important way to prevent human error is in process improvements and quality assurance activities. A disaster recovery plan that incorporates checking and double checking is often the best remedy, along with online backups is best.
The Internet and the Web 2.0 revolution have not only forced companies to be more transparent and accountable but competition in all in industries has greatly increased. With increased competition come lower prices, better service, and less forgiving customers. Most customers demand perfection because they know that if your company can’t provide it, the next competitor in line is ready to give it their best shot to win the business. It’s imperative not to give your customers a reason to leave because of something preventable like an outage in service.
While on average it is much cheaper to retain a customer then to acquire a new customer, re-acquiring an old customer after an IT disaster can be next to impossible. It takes a lot to earn customers’ trust, but after an IT disaster like loss of data or an extended outage in service, trust quickly evaporates. This is especially true when your customers are losing up to thousands of dollars per minute of downtime, which is not uncommon in some industries. Most IT disasters are deemed absolutely unacceptable to end users. Get a disaster recovery plan–it is far less expensive to prevent a disaster than try to re-acquire lost customers after one has occurred.
The age-old saying is as true today as it was when first uttered. You can have one of the most well-crafted ships ever made, but if your crew can’t see the iceberg just beyond your line of sight, then it doesn’t matter upon impact. No business is immune to IT disasters, but there are many things you can do to prevent them or quickly recover. There is no excuse not to have an IT disaster recovery plan in place – today. An ideal disaster recovery plan would place your production servers in a top tier data center with no single point of failure on the power and network connections. Your disaster recovery backup servers would be at another data center at least 45 miles away in case of a severe natural disaster. This would ensure that you’re virtually protected from any downtime, and you have put your business in position to survive the most brutal IT disasters.
No business is invulnerable to IT disasters, but speedy recovery due to a well-crafted IT disaster recovery plan is expected by today’s ever-demanding customers. Too many businesses fail because they were ill prepared for an IT disaster, even when a simple solution like online backup could have easily saved them. If you haven’t thought about developing an IT disaster recovery plan yet, it should be at the top of your priority list. Your business and customers demand it.
Looking for help starting an IT disaster recovery plan? Otava can help. Our experts can help you create and execute a DR runbook and plan, design and architect your recovery environment, and even manage it for you, all with Disaster Recovery as a Service. Contact us to learn more, or even try DRaaS out free for one month.
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Otava provides secure, compliant hybrid cloud solutions for service providers, channel partners and enterprise clients. By actively aggregating best-of-breed cloud companies and investing in people, tools, and processes, Otava’s global footprint continues to expand. The company provides its customers with a clear path to transformation through its highly effective solutions and broad portfolio of hybrid cloud, data protection, disaster recovery, security and colocation services, all championed by its exceptional support team. Learn more at www.otava.com.
