Every business is at risk, no matter its size or apparent resilience. While your business – large or small – might be operating efficiently at the moment, there’s no telling when you might experience a data breach or network failure that damages your revenue and your reputation.
In this article, we will look at how you can disaster-proof your business and protect it from losses. The process begins by identifying the risks and outlining a plan; after that, you test your plan regularly and prepare for unfortunate events – always consider partnering with an expert.
Evaluate the Risks
Risks come in different forms, depending on the nature of your business. The first thing you need to do is a data assessment of your company that quantifies the risks of network downtime and data security. Then you can prioritize your data sets to ensure protection and recovery.
Typically, risks to companies fall into two categories there are data risks and network risks. Data risks can be threats from cybercriminals that can lead to libel actions that run into millions, but network risks can also be costly – downtime is expensive for business and inconvenient.
Choose an IT Partner
Depending on the size and complexity of your business, you may or may not know about all of the risks. One excellent way to identify risks and disaster-proof your business is to choose an IT partner to work with. IT Support is available for any size of business, even small businesses.
With an IT partner, you get 24/7 IT support, a dedicated point of contact, problem-solving solutions to keep your business operational, as well as on-site IT support, just like in the old days. So if you want to protect your business from disaster, choose an IT support partner today.
Outline a Plan
If you don’t plan for disaster, then you put your business on the rocks right away; on the other hand, a little planning goes a long way. That said, once you formulate a plan, it makes sense to cover all the bases and make sure your business can handle network failures and downtime.
Again, partnering with IT support is a great way to outline a plan that delivers on your company’s metrics. A standard disaster recovery plan should include a recovery time objective, an inventory of your hardware and software, and the roles and responsibilities of your employees.
Test the Plan
Every plan needs to be tested to ensure that your acceptable recovery time is realistic and workable; there are various types of testing you can carry out, including a walkthrough test, a simulation test, a checklist test, full interpretation testing, and parallel testing methods.
If you have an IT support partner, they might be able to guide you to the best possible test for your business – remember that cost and downtime are also a factor! The simplest and most convenient form of testing is a walkthrough test that doesn’t usually require any downtime at all.
Backup Your Data
Any good recovery plan includes data backup options to protect data from being stolen and to recover it quickly if the system goes down. Again, there are many options to choose from depending on the business size, working with an IT partner helps you find the best storage.
But capacity is not the only consideration you need to make when it comes to data storage, you also need to think about recovery times. The longer your business is offline, the more revenue is lost, in most cases, businesses can get back online within 24 hours, but there are faster options.
Create Better Access
A typical business disaster might consist of a network failure or data breach that causes the company to shut down temporarily, but that doesn’t mean the business can’t continue to operate are earn while the shutdown is in progress. A good disaster plan keeps things operational.
These days, a disaster recovery plan not only includes a return to operations as fast as possible but also allows your business to continue to operate by switching to cloud services and virtual workstations. Remember to test resilience by switching key applications over to virtual stations.
Laptops and Mobiles
When businesses look at data security, they tend to focus on data centers, but the majority of businesses run two-thirds of their operations on laptops and mobiles nowadays. These devices are not only susceptible to the same data breaches, they are vulnerable in other ways as well.
By their nature, mobiles and laptop devices are insecure; they are portable and more difficult to secure; that said, there are measures you can take – such as screen locks – when you distribute them to employees. Still, a resilient DR plan for laptops and mobiles is needed to bounce back.
Secure Data Storage
Whether you are working on a disaster recovery plan for your business or your want to make it more efficient, you need a secure data storage facility. Cloud storage not only grants you access to your applications, data, and files on-demand, but it also allows you to back up data long term.
Secure data storage is available from companies such as CHSNetworks, which provide IT support services, managed service providers, and cybersecurity services. If you have any questions about your company’s security or disaster recovery plan, look them up online.
Final Thoughts
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen; even the most unexpected occurrences can put your business on the rock and threaten your livelihood. So if you didn’t have a disaster recovery plan in place, now is the time to set one up and test it. If you’re unsure about anything, contact an IT specialist for expert advice and more DR options.
Finding the best disaster recovery plan is subjective in many ways; you are best placed to identify the risks to your bottom line and data security. That said, partnering with an IT support expert is also recommended; an expert will be able to find any blind spots and build resilience.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
