The Benefits of Planning for Disaster Recovery

A disaster can be something physical like an office fire, or something digital like a data breach or ransomware attack.

Many business disasters can knock out an entire business’s data in minutes. The consequences become more severe when the business has no disaster recovery plan in place. Almost half of all businesses without a disaster recovery plan which experiences a data breach or ransomware attack will go out of business in the following 6 months.

In the wake of a disaster, a disaster recovery plan outlines scenarios and protocols for rapidly resuming work and reducing interruptions. It is an essential part of what is called a business continuity strategy. It enables sufficient data and critical systems to be restored in order for the business to operate at a minimum level as soon as possible.

Business sustainability, whatever the situation, is the clear advantage of developing a disaster recovery plan.

Here are some of the benefits of an effective disaster recovery plan.

1. Save Money

While there will be an upfront cost to developing a disaster recovery plan. You can think of it as insurance. If there is a disaster, every minute of downtime equates to more and more lost income. If that situation continues, you lose customers permanently, and your reputation for reliability will suffer greatly.

It is also a competitive advantage. Ransomware attacks can often take out multiple companies at one time as they spread. If both you and a competitor suffer an attack on the same day, you will be at a significant advantage if you can recover almost immediately.

2. Boost Your Productivity & Efficiency

As part of developing a disaster recovery strategy, a full audit of your current technology, staffing, and processes will be required. This is a great opportunity to re-evaluate how these things are managed and effectiveness and efficiency can improve accordingly.

Disaster recovery preparation can, in some cases, involve having at least two individuals capable of performing the same job. In the long run, such redundancies will prove to be extremely beneficial. In addition, there will also be a competent person inside the company capable of coping with the respective position if someone is out on holiday or on sick leave. Which in turn keeps your productivity at a steadier level.

3. Improved Customer Service

Customers are seeking excellence and reliability today. In the case of errors or downtime, they are not very forgiving. Customers can simply switch their business to a competitor when your company does not fulfill its standards.

Planning for disaster recovery helps organisations to retain a high level of customer service regardless of the circumstances. It can be almost hard to regain an old customer in the wake of an IT disaster.

Customers would be negatively impacted by downtime in some sectors. For B2B service providers, this is particularly true. Your company’s downtime will impact the integrity and reputation of your client’s businesses as well. As a consequence, disasters can have a chain reaction, affecting not just one business but many.

And after disaster strikes, reducing the risk of downtime and data loss ensures that the customers can rest assured that they will continue to receive sufficient service. Customer communication and retention should be a top priority for any disaster recovery plan.

4. Disaster Recovery Helps Your Business Be More Scalable

Innovative methods are one of the main things you would have to do while trying to recover from disasters. Technologies such as cloud data storage and easily recovered backups will ease your archive management process, increase backup reliability and reduce any eventual disaster recovery costs.

They provide more versatility than the management of an on-site or off-site data center since cloud options are far easier to scale. A transition to newer technology can be completed well before a tragedy strikes (if ever).

Businesses participating in such strategic planning will easily uncover a solution for data storage that makes far more sense than the one currently used and can be tweaked on the go.

Planning for disaster recovery will streamline IT procedures, help to remove excess hardware, and minimise the impact of human error. Planning for disaster recovery will streamline IT procedures, help to remove excess hardware and minimise the impact of human error.

In Conclusion

If you are interested in disaster recovery and we’d hope you would be after reading this you should contact a managed IT service provider who specialises in disaster recovery planning. Ask for real-world examples of when they have actually had to implement the disaster recovery technologies they are recommending.