The recent pandemic has served as a major wake-up call for every business. Those who have been operating without a disaster recovery and business continuity plan have struggled to adapt to remote working and the challenges that this has brought with it.
No one could have anticipated a global health crisis of this magnitude, but the reality is that a disaster such as a fire, flood, or power outage can happen at any time and without warning.
While you may think that these types of threats will never affect your business, they’re surprisingly more common than you think.
Despite the risks, many businesses are simply not prepared for these types of events. 51% of companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place, and 43% of companies that experience major data loss will go out of business within 12 months.
With such worrying odds, it’s clear that you must invest in a disaster recovery solution that will protect your business. Think of it as an insurance policy, you may never use it, but if the time comes, you’ll be glad it’s there!
In this blog post, we’ll share five reasons why you need an IT disaster recovery plan for your business and how we can help you plan for the unexpected.
Top 5 reasons why you need a disaster recovery plan
1. Technical Failures
In an ideal world, technology should work seamlessly all the time but unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Servers can crash, hardware can fail and even something as simple as a software update can disrupt systems. Whatever the cause, if your IT Infrastructure fails it can take all your data with it and wreak havoc on your business. A disaster recovery and business continuity plan will help minimise disruption to service, prevent data loss and ensure that your business can recover quickly from a technical failure.
2. Cybercrime
Cyber threats come in all shapes and sizes, but ransomware is undoubtedly one of the biggest threats facing businesses today. Within the last year, the Garda has noted a significant spike in ransomware attacks against Irish businesses, with the recent attack against the HSE demonstrating just how vulnerable organisations are to this type of threat. To prevent your business from being crippled by an attack, you should have a plan in place that will help restore systems quickly, limit the impact of an attack and prevent the loss of valuable data.
3. Natural Disasters
Mother Nature can be unforgiving. Storms, fires, and floods are all capable of destroying your business in a single blow. Without having a plan in place for when such events occur, you may find yourself unable to resume operations, putting the future of your company at risk. A dire statistic shows that 90% of companies will fail within a year if they are unable to get back up and running within 5 days after a disaster.
4. Human Error
People make mistakes. It’s inevitable, and it happens all the time in workplaces across the country. Whether it’s forgetting to save changes, deleting an important document, or clicking on a dubious link, any one of these simple mistakes could be devastating for your business. While it can be difficult to eradicate human error entirely, there are steps you can take to reduce it. You should train employees on what’s acceptable behaviour within your organisation and conduct regular backups so that in the event of an incident, your data can be restored quickly with minimal disruption.
5. Cost of Downtime
The effects of IT failures can be serious, but downtime on your network infrastructure can be catastrophic. Not being able to access your data and business systems for even a short period of time can have dire consequences, both financially and in terms of reputation. If customers lose trust in your company’s abilities, they could end up leaving in their droves. The longer you’re offline the worse things can get – but having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan will help you resume business operations quickly and prevent data loss.
How Ortus Can Help
If you haven’t thought about disaster recovery, now’s the time to start. If the last year has taught us anything it’s that we must prepare for the unexpected. Things can and do go wrong, and with so much at stake, it’s important to plan for the worst-case scenario.
At Ortus, our team will work closely with you to design a disaster recovery and business continuity plan that’s specifically tailored to your business. This will help identify and mitigate risks, so that if disaster strikes, we’ll have a plan of attack that will get your company back up and running again in no time – saving time, money, and data.
Get in touch to find out more about our business continuity and disaster recovery services.
