Why Your Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Strategy
Is your business ready if the unthinkable happens? The statistics suggest that the likelihood that your business could survive a disaster is slim. In fact, 58% of small businesses don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place to protect their data if a disaster strikes or if their information is breached. This lack of planning can be catastrophic to businesses of all sizes, affecting credibility and even the longevity of the company.
Here are five reasons your business needs a disaster recovery strategy.
- Stuff happens
Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters can damage your physical office location and wipe out your data. Computers crash. Hackers can infiltrate your system. Software gets corrupted.The biggest threat to your data, however, is the carefully cultivated team of professionals you hired to make your business great. Your team edits, deletes, and overwrites files every time they are on their computers, and IBM reports that more than half of all data loss comes from human error. Even if you emphasize being diligent about data protection to your team, people make mistakes and your business needs to be prepared for the worst. - Compliance regulations
Having credit card information, certain customer data, HIPAA-protected medical information, or other personally identifiable information in your system makes you liable to protect such confidential data. You are responsible to protect that data to the point that you may have a legal obligation to do so. Forrester’s Disaster Recovery Preparedness Benchmark Survey reports that 65% of all businesses have compliance requirements, and a disaster recovery plan can help you abide by such regulations. - Downtime costs you money
Losing important data equals lost productivity. No business wants to pay their team to recreate documents that already exist – it’s like paying them twice for the same outcome. But that’s if they are capable of reproducing them. For some industries, lost documents simply can’t be replaced without starting over completely. Not only will your employees not be able to access the information they need to do their jobs, your customers may not be able to either. If your clients can’t wait for you to get things back up to speed, you may lose their business. - You may not be able to recover everything
Sometimes, you can get your systems up and working again in a way that makes things appear that you’re back to normal. However, even if you can get your systems back up and running, you may not get all your data back. Can you afford to lose all the information you’ve spent years collecting? - It can cost you everything
If the first four reasons haven’t convinced you, here are two scary statistics that should concern every business:- 60% of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that suffer a disaster shut down within half a year
- 93% of business that lose their data storage for two weeks file for bankruptcy within the next year
If your business does not have a disaster recovery plan, you are putting yourself at risk. Contact us today to learn more about disaster recovery options for your business. We will conduct a risk assessment and give you specific recommendations to help you protect your data and your business.
