With the increasing threats of fires, freak thunderstorms and cyber terrorism echoing for a number of years, it is certainly not a case of “IF” a disaster will strike your business, but rather, its a question of “WHEN”. When that happens, is your business prepared for it? Will your business continue and recover from it? What is your business continuity plan? What are your disaster recovery options?
It is important to have a set of precautions and pre-planned responses to an event. laid-out in an easy-to-understand and detailed implementation with a single purpose of keeping your business running with little or no downtime. Think about what would happen if your business was to be hit by a fire? Would it survive? How much downtime would it take to put you back online, serving the needs of your customers?
According to a study of companies that have suffered a major loss of data, 43% never reopen for business, 51% close within two years and just 6% will survive long-term. For a fraction of those survivors, businesses continued as usual, thanks to their “failsafe” business continuity plan. It’s more than just disaster recovery, its full preparedness that bypasses the need for a 2-week downtime, financial ruin, wasted salaries and reputation loss. But all of that requires prior planning, prior preparedness, and prior commitment into believing to plan for the unavoidable.
How Do You Survive a Disaster?
Prioritize: You will need to plan exactly what you will want to recover first and designate who is in charge of making it happen. It goes beyond listing down a checklist of things to do. It’s taking an analytical, process-based approach to recovery from every unique business perspective. A cautionary note: You cannot afford to provide recovery for everything. You will need to understand what is “necessity” versus what is “good-to-have”.
Backup: It is known to everyone that backup takes the essence of what we hope to achieve. However, do realize that it is not sufficient to have only one copy. One will need to have 3 copies of a backup. Why 3? One local copy for which you use every day. Another backup copy on a disconnected device in your office and another copy in a remote location or the cloud. The local backup copy is your lifesaver for the accidental deletes or system crashes. The disconnected copy is for ransom-ware incidents and the remote or cloud copy is when your physical location is rendered inhospitable and incapable of operations. With 3 backups like that, you will improve your chances of regaining your required data.
Test: Make sure everyone in your business know what the plan is when something goes wrong. No one likes to plan for a disaster but preparedness is the only defense. Test, prepare and rehearse your business continuity plan under all simulated conditions and it will help you iron out the obstacles in your recovery efforts.
As your business IT environment becomes more complex, carries more responsibilities and risk, so does the importance of a robust business continuity plan. The prominent use of technology requires it. It is no longer a choice, it is a necessity. The best Business Continuity plans look beyond disaster recovery, taking into account scalability of your system and scope of your individual business, to create a strong guide that will keep your business operational, both now and for the long term.
If you are ready to take your Business Continuity needs to the next level, give us a call or use the web form to contact us.
ManagedIT.SG is an IT Support, IT Solutioning and Managed IT Service Provider specializing in serving Small Businesses in Singapore. Call us at +65 6748 8776 and let us manage your Small Business IT today!