Stuff happens, and this stuff can often be bad. That’s an inescapable part of life, especially if you’re trying to run a successful business. That said, the consequences of this bad stuff can usually be minimized—if not mitigated entirely—when you have a proper disaster recovery strategy.

Let’s review what goes into preparing this kind of strategy in the most effective way and what makes it so crucial.

Why Do Businesses Need a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Isn’t the idea to avoid disasters?

While yes, it is always preferable for things to go smoothly, we said it above… stuff happens. This stuff can come in all shapes and sizes, too.

• Weather events can interfere with your operations and potentially lead to infrastructure damage.
• Fires, floods, and other mishaps can also damage your infrastructure.
• Cyberattacks and bugs can render your technology inaccessible.
• Power or Internet outages can prevent many processes from being accomplished.
• Health events can prevent people from coming to the office.

If you’ll take note, none of these are particularly predictable events, and there’s a limit to how much you can do to prevent some of them. This means you ultimately need to be prepared to deal with any of them efficiently and effectively—and, should something happen regardless of your preparations, to have a means of bouncing back into action.

That is the purpose of your disaster recovery plan. It allows you to react swiftly and appropriately in response to any event that could cause business disruption and downtime. As an additional bonus, it can help make these recovery processes less expensive. This is a real benefit when you’re also contending with the compounding costs of downtime.

Plus, many business compliance standards require such preparations to be in place, so designing a disaster recovery plan can assist you in meeting your business’ essential benchmarks.

What Does a Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Strategy Require?

Implementing a disaster recovery strategy requires several steps. First, your business must account for every potential risk it may face, conducting a risk assessment to evaluate the likelihood of each and then determining each risk's business impact.

Other key metrics to consider include your recovery time objective, which is how long your business can sustain downtime but still be able to recover, and your recovery point objective, which establishes how much data your business could theoretically lose before it fails (which informs you how far back you should go when saving backups).

We can assist your business in doing all this and more, helping them stay secure and productive even in the face of disaster. To learn more about disaster recovery and overall business continuity, give us a call at (415) 295-4898.