Is Your Business Ready for Disaster Recovery?

As a solution provider who helps IT organizations keep up with the ever-evolving world of technology, I get the pleasure of interacting with many organizations. It’s during these interactions I get a very disheartening feeling that many organizations are unsure of all that is required to complete daily processes, what their disaster plan is or if it would work as planned.  Easily, 30%-40% that I talk to don’t even have a disaster plan. In fact, according to Nationwide’s 2015 Survey 75% of small businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan in place.

If a time would come when you would have to replace a key person at a moment’s notice or if a disaster (flood, power outage lasting days, tornado, etc.) would occur, do you have the documentation and/or systems in place to pick up without missing a beat? How long would it take to replace a co-worker at a moment’s notice?  What would the cost be to your organization while you wait on a replacement to figure out how to complete the process? Or even better, how long would it take to recover from a disaster? Would you recover? Do you have an emergency notification process for your employees?  Where to meet? Is staff available to work?

I could bet that approximately 80-90% of us have some sort of plan for our families – a designated place to meet if a disaster strikes near home, phone numbers to call, insurance policies, etc.  So why not with your business? You have general liability and work comp insurance policies. Why stop there? Disaster, business continuity, and process management plans are all a type of insurance.

I hear so often that the disaster recovery, business continuity, and process management projects are permanent residents on the yearly project list for organizations but never get completed.  I get it.  The thought of all the time, effort and cost needed to complete can be overwhelming and extremely taxing on internal staff. But I ask you, how much more will it cost if you need to scramble to keep your business running? What would your response be to upper management when they find out it might be days, weeks before your systems are back in order?

Where data center downtime hits the hardest according to Storage Craft’s blog on Business Continuity Statistic for IT Pros

Be the one with the “gold” star by your name when the time comes. And, it will come.

Will it take money? Yes

Will it take time? Yes

Will it seem never ending? Yes.

But with a team working toward one goal it can be done.

Again I ask – Are you ready?  Are your employees ready?  How much are you willing to risk?