With the hurricane and wildfire season already underway, as well as security incidents year-round, it’s never too soon to have a plan in place. Even the briefest power outage can be a problem, with network downtime costing thousands per minute. Read on to learn about the need for a disaster preparedness plan for your business.
Cost of Failing to Plan
Natural disasters, as well as man-made cyber attacks, cause downtime, which is costly for your company–in more ways than one. First, it makes you unable to serve customers and perhaps unable to work at all. Who knows how much revenue you might have earned if you could get the network back up and running in a short time? Downtime, whether from an outage or just a decrease in network quality (a “brownout”) can cost an organization an average $600,000. Your company’s reputation can also suffer, if you are not available for business, or because of lost/compromised data. You may be subject to fines for non-compliance with data-protection regulations. How, then, can you afford not to have a clear and tested plan?
How to Develop a Plan
A Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) plan is a vital part of protecting your company from the consequences of a disaster, either natural (fire, hurricane or earthquake) or man-made (a security incident such as a ransomware attack). But how to get started, when the process may seem overwhelming? A good first step is to audit your network to discover how it’s doing currently. What network holes need patching up, and where are the bottlenecks? Do you currently have redundancy/failover to keep traffic moving? Also, what hazards and risks are most relevant to your location? Does any on-premise equipment have needed cooling mechanisms? Is every staff member prepared to handle a possible phishing email, a key avenue through which attacks can occur? All these questions, and more, are ones to consider.
Testing Your Plan
Once you have a plan in place, testing it will show if any weaknesses exist. You can also determine how well the plan works, and discover issues you haven’t anticipated. For example, can you recover backed up data quickly? This makes a difference in ability to comply with data regulations and hence maintain stakeholder trust.
With natural and man-made threats ever present, it’s never too soon or too late to put a BC/DR plan in place. For further assistance, contact your trusted technology advisor today.
