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As a business leader, you’re used to taking risks, right? It’s practically in the job description. However, there’s a big difference between taking risks in search of a reward and taking unnecessary, avoidable risks with serious consequences and repercussions.
We live in a world where so much business relies on technology and IT, which naturally brings its own set of risks. Proactive business leaders anticipate risks and are ready to tackle them. Yet, one risk many business owners fail to recognise is a systems outage.
Whether your system goes down due to a cyberattack, human error or natural disaster, a BCDR strategy could be your business’s lifeline to bounce back and survive.
Here are 4 reasons why you should care about BCDR.
The cost of downtime is multi-faceted, let’s start with employees. If your employees lose access to business-critical applications and data, your productivity and revenue are directly impacted. After all, salaried employees will still be paid even if they can’t work.
Suppose your customers aren’t receiving the work/products/services that they have paid for. In that case, consumer confidence could be knocked, resulting in a loss of future/repeat business, as well as a damaged reputation.
In addition to the above points, you must consider fines if data laws are breached, the cost of replacing hardware and the time between your systems going down and being fully operational again.
Backup and business continuity are not the same. You’d be hard-pressed to find a business today that doesn’t conduct some form of data backup.
But what happens if a flood wipes out your primary and backup servers? You need to know the systems your business relies on will continue to operate, no matter what.
Sending a copy of data offsite for disaster recovery is one way to ensure business continuity. Historically, this meant sending tapes to a secondary location or tape vault. Today, BCDR solutions can run applications from backup instances of virtual servers.
The best of them extends this capability to the cloud—an approach known as disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The ability to run applications in the cloud while onsite infrastructure is restored is a game-changer for disaster recovery. As a business leader, you don’t want yesterday’s backup technology.
Not all disasters are broadcasted in the news. For most, disasters include freak weather incidents, buildings burning down and high-level cyberattacks. However, most IT downtime is due to common, accidental or malicious data deletion, damage to hardware or poor security habits.
Although it may seem less severe, a cyberattack could halt business operations for just as long, if not longer than your business flooding or burning down. Having technology in place that allows your business to continue operations following any disaster is vital for business survival.
The last two years have shown how resilient we can be as businesses. However, it’s always better to be prepared. Ensuring access to applications and data following a disaster is just one piece of the BCDR puzzle. Evaluating your business’s ability to restore IT operations can be a good starting point for company-wide business continuity efforts, but good BCDR planning should look at the business as a whole, and the goal should be to develop business resilience, in addition to cyber resilience. In fact, many BCDR planning efforts start by conducting a business impact analysis or risk assessment — these studies can reveal weaknesses in your business’s ability to continue operations that go far beyond IT. You know a disaster (natural or otherwise) will be coming to your company at some point. When it does, you want to be as well-prepared as possible
Business continuity and disaster recovery is a company-wide responsibility and failure to protect your business from human error, hardware failure, and/ or natural disasters can be detrimental and impact every stakeholder. Once you’ve implemented a solid BCDR plan, you will sleep better knowing you’re fully prepared for any disaster that might come your way.
To learn more about BCDR and implementing a solution in your business, why not join us on Thursday 27th October, for our free breakfast seminar? You can find out more information and register for your free ticket on our website.