You probably already know the importance of protecting your data, and have a backup process in place, but having a backup solution is only one piece of the bigger puzzle when it comes to business continuity planning. According to 2015 statistics from Infrascale, based on a collection of industry surveys, the average time it takes for a business to recover from a disaster is 18.5 hours. Even for a small company, this could be a substantial cost! Downtime can be a result of a natural disaster, hardware failure, data loss, security breach, server outage, or anything that touches your business operation. Often, there’s no way to predict when and how downtime will occur, but it can have catastrophic effects on your business.
The focus is often on the IT services and systems but true business continuity planning looks at the operations as a whole for a business. Business continuity planning is a way to continue business operations outside of normal systems, processes and procedures. For example, a basic backup system works well if someone deletes a file and needs to retrieve it, but what happens if an entire system goes down and how can you keep working?
With the emerging dominance of cloud based systems, business continuity plans are changing to reflect the reliance on internet connectivity, as well as offering viable alternatives to traditional systems. If a businesses core data and applications were cloud based, mobile workers could be quickly relocated and the business could still continue to operate. This does then raise the question of what happens if the cloud services are unavailable for a period of time so a balanced and measured approach should be taken.
You can prevent problems before they happen, minimize potential downtime and prepare for when issues occur! If you have any questions or concerns over disaster recovery and business continuity, please contact us for advice.
