While a major disaster, such as a tornado or hurricane, is unlikely, it’s best that businesses prepare for such catastrophic events. Doing so can minimize the negative effects of what could otherwise be a door-closing disaster. A disaster plan for the business should include ways to keep not only employees safe, but also the data and equipment necessary to keep the business running. With a little planning, any business can create a solid disaster plan for any situation that arises.
Global Disaster Recovery Management recommends that businesses start with a disaster risk assessment. This allows you to determine what needs to be done to account for the safety and security of employees, data and property while experiencing minimal interruption to business activities in the aftermath of a disaster. Come up with a disaster plan that implements all of these things and give it a trial run in the office. This is important because it lets employees know what they need to do if a real disaster situation arises.
The risk assessment also serves as a way to do a business impact analysis for the business. CSO Security and Risk Online notes that this analysis identifies the processes, systems and data that would have the largest negative impact on the business in the event of an outage. As a result, the disaster plan should center on ways to quickly and effectively restore or recover those things when a disaster results in an outage.
Not being prepared for a disaster can have negative consequences for the business. According to Global Disaster Recovery Management, within just 18 months of experiencing a disaster, around 80 percent of businesses close. If data is lost during the disaster, around 90 percent of those businesses close with two years of the event.
Protecting vital records and data can keep not only the company in business, but it can reduce downtime and interruption of business activities after the event. For that reason, IT protection and recovery is a vital part of a company’s disaster recovery plan. Cloud computing is one way that businesses can protect IT resources and systems and ensure a quick recovery to business as usual after a disaster takes place.
With cloud computing, there is no need for physical servers in the work place as everything is stored virtually on the cloud. Another benefit is that the cloud can be accessed from anywhere the employee has Internet access, which means that if the office is destroyed that employees can work from home or another remote location.
While a disaster of any type will certainly have its negative effects on a business, being aware of those effects can reduce and even eliminate some of them. All it takes is a little planning and implementations of countermeasures for your business to be ready to face a disaster.
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