Why Your Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan

In an ideal world, your company’s data would always be safe and stay intact. But we don’t live in that perfect world. And disasters are all too real. Unfortunately, many company owners believe that nothing bad will happen to their data — that is until it actually does happen and runs them out of business. 

Here is a rundown of five reasons why an information technology (IT) disaster recovery plan is so important for businesses much like your own.

What Exactly is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

This type of plan combines disaster resolutions and data backup solutions to accomplish the following:

• Ensure uptime
• Maximize productivity
• Diminish the loss of data

So, no matter what type of error or trouble plagues your data, your business’s information will be safe, thus protecting you against the several problems outlined below.

1. Loss of Customers

The modern customer is impatient for one simple reason: He or she does not have to be patient.

If your customers can’t get a particular product or service from you due to a business data disaster, don’t expect them to be sympathetic — at least not enough to stay with you while you work out the bugs in your system. Instead, expect them to search for better offers elsewhere.

That means immediate loss of revenue for you, and those customers you lost might not return due to the problems with your system.

2. Loss of Potential Clients

If you lack a disaster recovery plan, it won’t just affect your current clients. It’ll also affect your potential future ones.

After all, if you lose the trust of one of your current customers, those individuals may tell their friends and co-workers about your issues and keep them from using your services.

What’s worse, they may post negative comments about your business online, where you can never remove them.

All of this can deal an extensive blow to your reputation and online identity. Ultimately, it means additional revenue will be lost simply because you didn’t have a disaster recovery plan in place.

3. Termination of Staff

Losing staff following a data disaster is bad enough but what is even worse is having to terminate staff members due to financial issues that stem from that disaster.

Unfortunately, client churn may cause your company to lose money, which means you might have to reduce salaries and eventually layoff employees to decrease your staff size.

Few things are more painful than terminating individuals who have been loyal to your business for several years.

4. The Future Is Unknown

A recovery plan won’t prevent natural disasters from affecting you, but it will safeguard your data and make sure that downtime doesn’t impact your business.

In addition, cybercriminals are increasingly active, targeting companies they feel are not protected. And we’re not just talking about large corporations; we’re talking about small businesses, too.

After all, no matter how large or small your business is, you likely have essential data that are important to keep confidential. 

Along the same lines, sometimes major data loss has more to do with human error rather than hackers. A single incorrect move can easily wipe out all your company’s data in a split second, and sometimes the problem isn’t even a human being but rather your system itself. Systems, machines, and hardware eventually fail, and when this happens, data loss is inevitable.

Any of these issues could cause your business to go from flourishing to eventually filing for bankruptcy. This is why having a backup plan is so crucial: It’ll decrease the impact of any data disaster you may encounter.

What a Disaster Recovery Plan Will Look Like

So, it’s clear that having a disaster recovery plan is in order. But where do you start?

For starters, realize that although some data problems can be resolved in minutes or hours, others may require days or even weeks or months. So, while you’re trying to resolve a data situation, you need to have a temporary solution in place.

Of course, this temp solution must be able to deliver a level of service that is relatively normal, which means you need to keep your data up to date before a data incident occurs. GreenQube has been called on to step in and has helped companies recover from natural disasters, cyber attacks and data breaches. We are experts in data recovery and have even worked with the FBI on ransomware cases for businesses and governments.