Why your business needs a disaster recovery plan

There are many risks to a business’s data including hardware malfunctions, human error, natural disaster and ransomware. To mitigate these risks, most businesses have some form of backup solution. However, if this system is not part of a wider disaster recovery plan, businesses can experience significant downtime or loss of data. In this article we will discuss what is the make up disaster recovery plan, and why your business needs one.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a recorded process that organisations create that details their response to a disaster to their IT infrastructure or data. Each organisation is different in the way they operate and the way they store and use data. The goal of a disaster recovery plan is to minimise downtime and ensure business continuity, whilst minimising complexity.

In a disaster recovery plan, there are two objectives that must be set: a recovery point objective (RPO) and a recovery time objective (RTO). A RPO sets how far back to recover data from and defines the maximum amount of data lost from the previous backup. An RTO defines how long it takes for data to be recovered and until normal operations are restored to all users.

A backup solution forms a major component of a disaster recovery plan, as a comprehensive backup solution will automatically backup data to ensure the RTO and RPO is met.

Why Your Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan

Reduce Cost of Downtime

Regardless of a business’s size or industry, downtime results in loss of revenue. For some businesses, such as in healthcare, downtime can also result in individual being unable to access the services they desperately need. With a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, businesses will still experience downtime, but it will be significantly shorter, which reduces the amount of lost revenue.

Increase Customer Retention

Although a disaster can be devastating for businesses, it can also cause frustration for customers that are unable to access systems and services. If a business is down for too long, customers may stop using the services all together. A disaster recovery plan can ensure that customers will still get the service they are used to, even when a disaster occurs.

Avoid Paying Ransom

Over the past 5 years, the number of businesses that have fallen victim to ransomware attacks has grown drastically. Previously, ransomware gangs targeted large businesses as they were able to demand larger ransoms. However, recently more smaller businesses have been targeted as they typically have weaker security. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan should include a secure backup service, so if a business falls victim to a ransomware attack, their backups are not encrypted.‍

Mitigate Human Error

Disasters are not always fire, floods and ransomware. It can simply result from an employee accidentally deleting a file, at best this means that the employee must create a document again, at worst it can mean having to rebuild a dataset. With a disaster recovery solution, data can easily be recovered if something is accidentally deleted.

Looking to Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Although businesses will do everything to prepare and prevent the worst from happening, there are some things which are outside of our control. If your business does not currently have a disaster recovery plan in place, now is the time to create one, before it is too late. After a disaster recovery plan is implemented, businesses should test these plans to ensure that if a disaster does occur, the business can continue to function.

The relatively small amount of planning now, can save your business significant downtime and money from lost data. If you want to find out more on how to create and implement a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in your business, get in touch today.