All businesses are aware that downtime costs a lot of money, but did you know that just one hour of it can cost a small business upwards of 8,000 in productivity waste? Also, medium businesses can lose almost 75,000 for the same amount of downtime, and large enterprises can lose around $700,000!
Fortunately, when you organize your own disaster recovery plan you can cut out a large chunk of those losses, especially if you're a small or medium-sized business.
The act of creating your own plan is simply making a series of steps to pick your business back up after it's been affected by a major natural or man-made disaster that scattered your workflow. Continue to read in order to discover the central points in a disaster recovery plan and how you can make your own that fits your business.
Before you go too deep into the planning stage, you need to figure out what your business absolutely needs to function and what could take these systems out. For example, you likely store almost all of your companies data on a few different servers/systems. If any of these crashed, your company could be sent back to the Stone Age. Keeping these running will ensure your business doesn't meet an untimely end.
With all of that in mind, make your list of important computers and servers your business needs. We'd recommend you also include valuable IT equipment such as large hard drives, etc. Your disaster plan will be focused on keeping these valuable pieces safe.
Data backup is highly recommended for small and medium-sized businesses. This involves making copies of the data on your computers and storing them online. Cloud backup services can be fully automated and they give business owners more peace of mind. In case of disaster, you can simply recover your precious data from a previous backup and get back on your feet.
Green Cloud is an excellent provider of cloud backup services. You can decide to back up your data automatically once every few hours or even more often. If something bad happens, you will be immediately notified by mail and/or phone and you can take action to save your business.
The average small/medium business works with important information like your clients' contact info, their personal addresses, finances, etc. Letting this get exposed can cause a major rift in your clients and ruin any chance of a trustworthy relationship.
Therefore, now is the time to start incorporating different cybersecurity measures starting with firewalls and antivirus software placed in all of your devices.
A firewall is especially useful as it can actively monitor all inbound and outgoing connections, which can help filter out malware and hacker attacks. Also, we'd recommend running scans of your computer systems with updated antivirus software on a regular basis.
There are several cybersecurity applications that can also scan your data in real-time, which would easily thwart a potential virus in it's attempt to spread to other computers. The leading provider for this kind of cybersecurity is Webroot, so we'd recommend incorporating them into your disaster recovery/prevention plan.
Sometimes one of your security systems will fail and if you don't have additional redundant systems in place your network can be exposed. Many different systems overlap in some of the areas and you can use this to add additional walls to your system ensuring your networks safety. It's just like when businesses have an emergency generator in the case of a blackout.
In the same vein, you can make up other server solutions that can give you additional computing power if one of your main computer systems fails. Many of these redundant solutions are incredibly affordable and can be scaled to fit the size of your business.
Your disaster recovery plan doesn't mean anything unless your staff knows how to put it into practice. Take the time to pick key employees who are able to enact your plan if worse comes to worst.
Create a plan with these individuals and assign them to specific systems and servers. As long as everyone knows their specific instructions your plan will go without a hitch.
It's also important to delegate someone in your primary staff to have some sort of executive power during an emergency. They will be responsible for coordinating the disaster recovery plan, making phone calls, and other vital decisions.
You might be satisfied with how your plan looks in theory, but without testing it you're risking your entire business to chance.
Make sure to set certain intervals where you can put your systems and team to the test. Once or twice a year should be adequate. Feel free to make any adjustments as these solutions are constantly updating on a regular basis.
Keep testing your cloud backups as well as they are the basis that your plan rests on. We'd recommend consulting with some key experts to design quality testing plan that doesn't compromise the productivity of your company.
Even the most basic plan is better than no plan at all. Disasters can happen at any point whether natural or man-made and can knock your business off track. Having a disaster plan will ensure that your business continues and your image and data are protected!
