What if your business services are hampered due to a natural disaster? It will certainly keep you away from contacting your employees and customers. So, how do plan on getting your business back together, following an emergency?
The methods that you use to bounce back after an unfortunate event is known as business continuity planning. Every company should have a business continuity plan in place. It is a perfect solution for backup and disaster recovery.
A business continuity plan helps to protect data on-premises that is present in the physical and virtual servers. No matter where your data is stored (be it on servers or SaaS applications), backup is a must. A business continuity plan goes a step ahead and offers your business the ability to restore its data and upgrades, also known as disaster recovery.
Whether it is a natural disaster or a cyber attack, with a solid business continuity plan in place you will have your business operations up and running in minutes. However, the severity and length of business disturbance caused due to disasters varies considerably. To avoid extended or permanent facility damage, it is essential that businesses maintain a continuous off-site backup of data, applications and server images.
We understand that all this can be a very expensive investment for any company. If you don’t have enough money to invest for this, you can seek financial aid from an alternative finance lender. We suggest that you get in touch with Nucleus and look for a funding option that is most suitable for your type of business.
Having a solid business continuity plan is a one-time investment. If you still have doubts about whether you should invest in this plan or not, we list four reasons that should in most likelihood dispel all your doubts.
1: Downtime is really, really, expensive
If you, your employees and customers lose access to your company’s critical applications and data, it will have a direct impact on your productivity and revenue. Although it is an obvious fact, most companies don’t consider the actual costs of downtime.
With a business continuity plan, you will be able to run your applications from your backup servers. This further helps the users to continue using their applications while the primary servers are restored. So, build a business continuity plan that helps reduce downtime.
2: Data backup alone is not enough
Usually, every business plan includes ways of conducting some form of data backup. But what if a natural disaster or a cyber attack wipes out your primary as well as the backup servers? Hence, sending a copy of your data to an offsite location should be considered as essential.
Previously, businesses use to send tapes to a secondary location or store them in a vault. Modern business continuity plans run applications from backup instances of virtual servers while some can also extend this capability to the cloud. In today’s era, it is possible to run business operations in the cloud while onsite infrastructure is restored.
Business owners need to understand that backup and business continuity are not the same thing, and your business requires both of these.
3: Disaster actually do happen
It is important to understand that every disaster isn’t broadcasted on news and weather channels. Most of the IT downtimes are due to common everyday actions such as accidental data deletion, damage to computer hardware and poor IT security.
A Ransomware attack or a virus can stop your business operations just as easily as a tornado or power surge. Such disasters are typically due to human errors – which are basically unpreventable.
4: Business continuity impacts everyone
Today, data is essential for any type of organisation, and thus ensuring access to business applications and data after a disaster is critical. However, this is just a single entity of the business continuity plan. Evaluating your company’s ability of restoring IT operations can prove be a good starting-point for building a solid continuity plan.
A solid business continuity and disaster recovery plan should look at a business as whole, and should aim towards developing business resilience. Many continuity plans start by conducting a business impact analysis or risk assessment, as these methods help reveal your company’s weaknesses and its ability to continue operations in case of failure.
