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Disaster Recovery Plans are Crucial to Keep Businesses Protected from Possible IT Failures
Your business’ operations rely on technology. In fact, technology and data are essential for it. You depend on your IT infrastructure and investment. Despite your best efforts, and the efforts of your IT professionals, these systems are imperfect. That’s where a disaster recovery plan, continuity plan, and protocols for data recovery and back up come in.
Business IT systems and hardware can malfunction from internal and external threats. These issues present serious challenges and consequences, costing you time, capital, and (in absolute worst-case scenarios) data.
There are any number of causes of system failures, data breaches, and data loss. Cyber threats, natural disasters, and even human error are frequently to blame. But how businesses recover from disasters will determine the extent of the damage. Recovery efforts will affect whether businesses can bounce back from IT disasters.
Disaster recovery plans are necessary to prepare and protect your business from disasters. IT systems need protection from the many threats that cause failures, disruptions, and loss of customers.
Why Disaster Recovery Should Be Part of Your Business Continuity Plan
Disaster recovery is one part of an organization’s business continuity plan. Businesses need to develop a business-continuity plan first before planning for disaster recovery.
A business continuity plan outlines how a business responds to a disaster and recovers from it. These plans are developed at the executive level and determine mission-critical data and systems.
With frequent data back-ups, businesses can restore systems promptly following a failure. With business priorities established, developing a successful disaster recovery plan can follow. Disaster recovery is an IT-based solution that keeps your business data and critical systems safe for fast recovery and restoration following a disaster.
Using software tools, data recovery experts identify key information and dependencies across IT systems. They then use these to develop comprehensive disaster recovery plans for businesses.
Businesses without disaster recovery plans rarely recover from an IT disaster. They can lose clients, customers, and thousands of dollars during downtime. What’s more, after a lengthy data recovery process must also work to rebuild their brand. Regaining customer trust and re-acquiring former customers is very costly and difficult.
Cloud technology offers a solution. Third-party disaster recovery solutions mean businesses have viable options to keep their data safe. So there is no reason why a business should take the risk and not develop an effective disaster recovery plan.
In the event of a disaster, you have to be prepared if you want to keep your business up and running for years to come. Here’s why:
Hardware Failures
Although fairly resistant, machines and hardware can fail. One minute, everything’s running smoothly, and the next, there’s an error. Lost Internet connections and hard disk failures are among the common frustrations in IT.
But with the help of third-party Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), you can make sure hardware failures won’t interrupt your services. And you won’t have to worry about data loss since your data will be safe in an offsite or cloud-based data centre.
Human Error
Disaster recovery plans use online data backups and security solutions that can save us from ourselves. Forgetting to save important files before a computer crash is all too common. As are entering incorrect data, or causing data loss altogether.
Human error is also responsible for causing security breaches. E-mail phishing scams and accidentally disabled firewalls are common causes of data breaches.
Whether the damage caused by human error is disastrously large or seemingly small, a plan for data recovery will keep your sensitive and mission-critical data safe from the inevitable human errors.
Transparency and Accountability
With the ever-expanding competition online, customers are expecting more from businesses these days. They expect lower prices and better service. And they want businesses to be 100% transparent and accountable. If a business doesn’t meet their expectations, they can easily go elsewhere to see if the competitors will.
This means businesses must work harder to satisfy customers. The smallest slip can cause customers to leave.
To avoid losing customers, businesses must protect their systems from service outages and data breaches. For customers, these problems are unacceptable. So they will likely take their business elsewhere if you lose their trust.
Client and Customer Retention
Retaining existing customers is much more affordable for businesses than acquiring new customers. And re-acquiring former customers who you’ve lost following an IT disaster is nearly impossible and extremely costly.
You would have to rebuild your customers’ trust. And if they lost thousands of dollars due to your system’s failure, they will not be forgiving.
If you want to keep your customers, it is up to you be a reliable, trustworthy business. You must make sure IT problems never affect your clients. It is much more cost-effective to implement a disaster recovery plan and retain customers than it is to risk losing them.
Protect Your Bottom Line
Your bottom line could suffer and never fully recover from a disaster if you lose your loyal customers. Businesses with known IT problems, such as data breaches and system failures, appear less trustworthy. Their brands become forever tarnished, becoming known as the companies who couldn’t protect their clients. And potential clients won’t want to take the risk of choosing a business with a poor service history.
By protecting your clients, your data, and your overall IT systems from disasters that can occur at any time, you are protecting your bottom line, and ultimately, your business.
No one is immune from technology failures and data loss. Whether caused by human error, hardware malfunction, cyber threats, or natural disasters, these failures can hit at any time.
But how well-prepared a business is to handle these disasters makes all the difference. The length of the disaster recovery time will determine whether businesses can retain customers, save money, and ensure your business continues to operate successfully with minimal downtime.