When severe weather, cyber breaches and other disasters hit, the topic of disaster recovery often finds its way to the top of many business owners’ and executives’ minds. After all, the ability to recover quickly and continue operating is key to your business survival. But unfortunately, after disaster strikes it’s already too late to ensure a smooth recovery.
Here are a few reasons why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning is essential to your business survival and some tips for making sure you’re ready if disaster hits your business.
Many Types of Disasters
There are a number of disasters that can impact your business. In areas like Texas that are prone to tornadoes and other severe weather, these events might be the first thing to come to mind. Yet, in today’s business environment, cyber disasters are an even more likely threat, as is equipment failure. Traditional, physical threats are always a concern too: fires, theft, flooding, to name just a few.
Cybercrime Could Cripple
Damage costs from cybercrimes are growing at an exponential rate, causing companies that make projections about costs to increase their estimates every year. A recent report from Cybersecurity Ventures predicted global cybercrime damages would exceed $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015.
The potential costs of cybercrime to a business include damaged or destroyed data, stolen funds, lost productivity, theft of physical or intellectual property, personal or financial data, fraud, business disruption, restoration of hacked data and systems and damage to the business reputation of affected firms.
Disaster Could Shutter Your Business
Yet, with so much on the line, many businesses are unprepared. According to FEMA, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of businesses that are affected by a disaster will fail to reopen. And 90 percent of smaller businesses will fail within a year unless they are able to reopen within 5 days. These are frightening statistics if you’re a business owner. Yet one in 5 businesses say they spend no time planning for disaster.
Disasters are Expensive
One thing all disasters have in common is that they lead to downtime; downtime means your business is accruing costs but is unable to generate revenue. That’s an expensive proposition. Wondering how much downtime might really be costing you? Here’s how to determine the costs to your business.
Calculating Labor and Revenue Cost
To calculate the labor cost of downtime, take the fully loaded labor costs of all your employees per week, month or year, divide by the number of hours worked during that timeframe, and multiply by the number of workers impacted by an outage. Then, add the revenue costs – Annual revenues divided by hours worked per year, multiplied by the outage hours. Add these revenue and labor costs together to discover the labor and revenue costs.
Disaster Recovery Planning is Essential
At Tolar Systems, we offer Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to ensure that if disaster strikes, your business gets “back to business” as quickly as possible. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are two sides of the same coin:
- Business Continuity planning helps your organization identify the steps necessary to get back to work quickly in the event of a disaster: who to notify in the event of a disaster, when to notify them, how to assess damage and activate the plan.
- Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is all about preparation and response: assessing and addressing security risks and other vulnerabilities, hardening your IT infrastructure against attack, making sure data is backed up and available even in the event of a disaster, such as on the cloud, and putting systems in place so that when a disaster does occur, your business is able to quickly respond and get back to work with minimal downtime and disruptions to your operations.
Prepare Now to Recover from Disaster
After a disaster strikes your business is too late to plan for an effective recovery. That’s why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning are essential. Tolar Systems can help; contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business respond and recover no matter what type of disaster strikes next.
