From serious security breaches affecting billions of users to hurricanes, fires and unpredictable weather spreading across the North American coasts, disasters – both man-made and natural – have hit the business world hard in 2018 continue to do so in 2019.
While your business might not be affected on such a large scale, any sort of outage can cause IT administrators and CIOs to lie awake at night wondering if they are well protected. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, leaving themselves vulnerable to the worst-case scenarios when a disaster strikes.
Why Do I Need a Disaster Recovery Plan?
In our digital world, disasters that affect our data and applications are inevitable. Whether it’s a deleted file, a ransomware attack, or a large-scale natural disaster, there are constant threats to IT infrastructure and to the businesses that depends on them. But you can minimize the impact of an outage by developing business continuity processes and a disaster recovery plan.
You can’t afford downtime
The reality is that your business cannot afford downtime. The news is filled with headlines of multiple natural disasters and an increase in man-made disasters, from hardware or software failure, malicious ransomware or careless users and accidents.
With shrinking IT budgets, the idea of spending money on the “what if” scenario isn’t always top of mind. However, what is harder, is putting a figure against the intangible costs of downtime. Ask yourself: “What would be your customers’ perception of you if they can’t reach your website?” With stiff competition in the market, any sort of downtime will cost you customers.
Backups are not a DR Plan
After a disaster, you can reinstall applications, get new hardware, and even run your internet line. But if you can’t access all of your business data, your business simply cannot operate.
Local backups can be targeted by malicious software, like ransomware that takes over your backup applications, database backup files, and locks them all down. If you are cyber attacked, how many thousands of dollars would your company pay to the cyber criminals to get your data back without going out of business?
Keep it in the Cloud
There are many reasons why businesses don’t have a DR plan. It can be a lack of manpower, skills, space or budget. However, the cloud provides agile, scalable, highly performing, highly adaptable and cost-effective solutions.
Disaster Recovery: What to Expect in 2019
Experts agree that the risk of cyber-attacks and natural disaster events will continue to increase in 2019 and into 2020. These risks spread to encompass SMBs, municipalities, community agencies, and enterprise organizations. Give yourself and your business leaders peace of mind by working with data and system protection experts to develop a strategic backup and disaster recovery plan for your business.
Planning for disaster recovery is essential for businesses to be proactive; not reactive. Putting a plan together can mitigate even the worst disasters, ensuring business continuity and success for years to come.
Storagepipe can Help!
The business costs of a data breach for business owners can be catastrophic but forewarned is forearmed. Our clients rest easy knowing that they have the tools in place to protect their business and clients from data disasters.
Learn more about what’s involved in planning a disaster recovery and business continuity strategy for your organization here.
Questions? Ask Our Experts!
