Power outages, data breaches, hardware failure, and other common problems can affect your company’s bottom line and revenue. The same goes for natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood. More than half of small businesses never recover from these events.
Each year, thousands of companies close their doors following a disaster. Some simply don't know how to handle the problem, while others go bankrupt or lose their customers. Despite being aware of these risks, over 75 percent of small businesses don't have a disaster plan in place.
What's your plan for surviving a disaster? Are you prepared for ransomware attacks, unplanned downtime, and other unfortunate events? If not, you risk going out of business.
Luckily, it's never too late to come up with a plan and ensure that your company will survive. Here's what you should know about business continuity vs. disaster recovery.
Imagine having your computer systems compromised. You may lose customer data, financial documents, sensitive business information, and much more. If you don't have a plan in place, you'll be facing hefty fines and revenue loss.
Whether we're talking about natural disasters or man-made disasters, these events can negatively impact your reputation and overall performance. You might even get sued by angry customers. That's why business continuity planning is critical.
Business continuity refers to the processes and operations that companies can implement to deal with potential threats and minimize losses. Think of it as the ability to keep your business running during and after a disaster.
As a business owner, it's your responsibility to establish a set of procedures that everyone in your organization will follow in the event of a cyber attack, storm, fire, and so on. The faster you recover from a disaster, the fewer the losses will be.
Basically, what you need is an action plan.
You must develop a strategy to keep your systems running smoothly and preserve essential resources. This may include identifying and setting up alternate work areas, saving data in the cloud, performing a business impact analysis, and more.
Contrary to popular belief, business continuity and disaster recovery are not one and the same. The latter is just a small part of business continuity.
Disaster recovery encompasses the steps needed to restore your systems and resources following a disaster. Implementing an SDS (software-defined storage) solution, for instance, will allow you to quickly restore your files in case of data center outages and other events.
A disaster recovery plan should cover your business data, software and hardware systems, connectivity, resource availability, and other critical aspects. It also needs to tackle the physical environment.
For example, you need to have an evacuation plan in place to protect your employees in case of fire and natural disasters.
Now that you know more about business continuity vs. disaster recovery, come up with a strategy and implement it in your organization. Identify any vulnerabilities and threats, test and update your systems, and establish procedures for recovering data and restoring your operations when disaster strikes.
Make sure you take the steps needed to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks in the first place. Use these tips to protect your small business and mitigate risks.
