Business Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery
Does your business have a disaster recovery plan?
It seems like there’s a new disaster popping up on the news more and more often these days. From hurricanes to wildfires to flooding, earthquakes, and tornadoes, the media is always keen to cover these stories from a human-interest angle. But what about the companies affected by these kinds of disasters? Or organizations that suffer data loss from hardware failure or data corruption?
Businesses are negatively impacted by disasters of all types—especially when you consider that according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), nearly 40% of small businesses never reopen after a disaster. A business closure could be devastating not only to an organization’s employees, but to its community, as well.
Ask yourself:
• What would happen if I arrived at work to find the building in flames?
• What would my company do if our internet or servers failed?
• How would my business operate in the wake of a catastrophic event?
• Can a disgruntled former employee sabotage my business?
You know that downtime costs money, but do you know how much? Even a few minutes of lost productivity adds up. What about hours or days of lost time? Delta Airlines learned the hard way; in September 2016, its five-hour IT outage cost it approximately $150 million dollars. The repercussions of that disaster continued rippling for three days, as more than 2,000 flights were cancelled or delayed, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers across the globe.
Business Continuity Planning
The best business continuity plan includes the steps your organization will take to ensure the company’s most critical online and offline operations are maintained after a crisis, so you can continue doing business. While similar, disaster recovery is just one piece of a business continuity plan; it’s how your business will recover your crucial data, business network solutions, and systems in the event of a loss.
What is a BCP or a Disaster Recovery Plan?
Business continuity and disaster recovery involve more than just insurance and backups. It’s about your IT infrastructure having the network diversity to fail over from one system to another, the ability to access backed up data and restore from backups, and reestablishing your business internet solutions. And it’s about your employees, as well; they need to know who to contact in case of an emergency.
Add Subheading: Network security
For the best and most reliable WAN or wide area network security, protect your network with a backup business network solution for your fiber optic internet access. In other words, two discrete internet connections, including dedicated fiber service. And it goes without saying that you should have multiple backups of your organization’s crucial data, including on the cloud plus onsite and off—and you’ll want to be sure you can access that data in an emergency. For example, if you’re flooded, will you be able to drive to the location where your backup tapes are stored?
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Services
Many companies offer business continuity and disaster recovery as a service. These are usually subscription-based, where you pay a monthly fee for a suite of services designed to help your organization survive calamity. With Disaster Recover as a Service (DRaaS), any company can find a business continuity plan term that fits its size and budget needs. But don’t wait until you suffer a loss to create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
Sparklight Business has Networking and Dedicated Internet Access solutions powered by a robust fiber-rich, redundant infrastructure. Learn more at business.sparklight.com/large-business/internet/dedicated-internet-access.
