If your small business is currently not prepared for disaster, then you should seriously consider taking practical steps to ensure you have a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place to avoid being caught off-guard. The changing digital landscape and businesses’ reliance on cloud services make ransomware attacks more common and particularly damaging.
Small business are vulnerable to disasters due to a multitude of factors but what makes potential disaster especially worrying is the statistic that 40 to 60% of small businesses never reopen their doors following a disaster. Further, 90% of smaller businesses will fail within a year if they cannot resume operations 5 days following a disaster. Consider also that 20% of larger companies spend over 10 days on BC (business continuity) and DR and a clear picture starts to emerge – preparing for disaster is a necessity.
Creating the Plan
How to Write a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Business
The first step in creating a successful DR plan is realistically assessing your small business’s strength and weaknesses, requirements, needs and budget. This will give you a chance to identify just how affected your business and systems would potentially be in a time of crisis. It’s worth thinking about the effects it would have on your business partners and company stakeholders too as the plan should be as comprehensive as possible.
When creating a DR plan, ask questions like ‘What is the cost of data loss for the business?’, ‘Does any of the data require protection?’, ‘What should be stored onsite and offsite?’ and ‘How will the business test DR?’ If these questions are too difficult to answer straight away, which they may be for a small businesses without staff with expertise in this field, then consider outsourcing your Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS).
Bringing In Help
How to leverage weather to build a disaster recovery plan
Outsourcing DR comes with many benefits, one which is relying on a service with considerable and specialized experience, expert in dealing with disaster recovery. For a small business, it can be particularly freeing as the service you choose will deal with all the details you may be unsure of or unqualified to take on properly. There are of course other advantages like a fully managed system, chance of predictable budgeting, plan adjustments based on industry changes and flexible solutions. Overall, the aim of DRaaS is to allow your business to get up and running again smoothly if most of your systems are run from the cloud.
All this may sound like a lot to take in and it certainly is. But it only works to highlight how pressing and essential it is for small businesses to start seriously thinking about DR and the potential damage it could cause your businesses should you be unprepared when disaster strikes.