It’s a rule that most businesses lead by, but it’s if you don’t plan for disasters they’re going to happen. Nobody wants to have to plan for a disaster, and there are people out there who are very trusting and don’t plan for anything. Instead, they trust in themselves and they carry on as if nothing’s ever going to go wrong. The problem is that while you can trust yourself that nothing is going to go wrong, you can’t trust the rest of the world!
A disaster can be something as simple as a broken pipe in the business that disrupts the office for a few days, but it can also be as big as an earthquake. The other disaster that tends to plague businesses these days is data loss. Customer data is something that every business has to protect, and while your business may not rely too heavily on technology right now, you still need to have a backup and disaster recovery plan in place just in case something goes wrong. It’s like insurance for your health: you have it and you pay for it and you hope you’ll never need it. With that in mind, here are some of the biggest reasons you need to have a disaster recovery plan in place.
- Security isn’t perfect. Businesses come in all shapes and sizes and no matter the industry you are working in or the type of business you have, you need to protect your work. It doesn’t matter if that’s blueprints for your architectural business or customer data for your retail business. There is no such thing as perfect security, so you have to make sure you have a backup plan in case your security systems fail.
- It’s better to have it and not need it. You’ve heard the phrase that prevention is better than cure, it’s why we take our vitamins and it’s why we have our fresh orange juice every day. We look to prevent illnesses rather than cure them. Well, the same can be said for your business. You want to prevent the data last before it happens rather than having to scramble to get that data back and get it protected. If you don’t get that protected, the ramifications are dire.
- Disasters happen even when you are not looking. You cannot predict an earthquake. You cannot predict a tsunami taking out your entire town. You also cannot predict when a hacker is going to choose your business as the vulnerable one to hack into. Preparing for these types of emergencies may feel like overkill, especially if you’ve been running for this long and you haven’t had an incident yet. But you don’t know what the hackers are doing today that they’re going to affect you tomorrow, so you need to make sure that you are prepared because a disaster can happen at any point.
- It’s an expensive recovery. If you don’t have a disaster plan in place, your recovery is going to be far more expensive and take a lot longer than you expect. With the right plans in place you can avoid all of this and you can make sure that your business is not one that is going to fall behind because of a disaster that happened.
