You’ve heard about it happening to other businesses, but it won’t happen to yours, right? Maybe your business has multiple locations or you’re nowhere near the path of a hurricane. It is easy to believe that your data safe. The fact of the matter is, every business will at some point experience a data loss. The only way you can avoid it, no matter your company size or location, is to have a plan in place to evade and recover from a disaster.
A disaster is classified as any event that interrupts a business’ normal operations. This includes a sever event such as a fire or an earthquake, as well as more common disruptions like hardware failure or an employee accidentally deleting an important file from a shared drive.
In order to maintain a successful business you will need to be able to recover from any disaster. Downtime can cost businesses untold amounts, from the loss of current customers to a competitor, to loss of potential customers due to a tarnished reputation. Preparing for potential downtime allows businesses the chance to prevent it. Creating and implementing a disaster recovery plan is your best bet at achieving this.
Data backup should be a fundamental part of your disaster recovery plan. As preparation for building a recovery plan, you should evaluate your business’ daily operations. Have a clear understanding of where your data is. What is most important to maintaining business continuity is not only an effective recovery plan, but the business practice of continuously reexamining your business for optimal growth.
Regularly scheduled backups of data from all mobile devices to network servers will be an integral part of your recovery plan. Also hard copies of important records should be converted into digital formats. Thus allowing them to be backed up to your network servers as well.
Migrating the data on your servers to the cloud and utilizing an IT management provider with 24/7/365 support further solidifies the safety of your data. There is no way to prevent a natural disaster and it is inevitable to encounter a cyberattack, human error or hardware failure. The best way to protect your business is by investing in a Disaster Recovery Plan.