How to Disaster Proof Your Business

Disasters can strike any business. They can inflict serious financial losses and even shut an organization down for good. Surviving one requires planning.

They aren’t limited to the obvious physical disasters, such as fires,  floods, and theft of equipment. Massive data loss can be just as harmful. It can result from a hardware failure that wipes out a disk, or  from malware that does the same thing.

Ransomware has become a major risk in the past few years. It scrambles the data on computers and backups and then demands a payment for the code to restore the files. Making the payment doesn’t always get the mangled files back.

Most small businesses have no disaster recovery plan. Nationwide Insurance reports that only 18 percent of companies in the United States with fewer than 50 employees have such a plan. The report estimates that 25 percent of businesses don’t reopen after a major disaster.

Small businesses are at greater risk, since the loss of one server won’t wipe out a huge enterprise but could ruin a small business. Having a plan significantly improves the chances of survival.

Insurance can cover the replacement cost of lost physical assets, but money won’t get back lost data. Replacing a computer requires setting it up with the software and data from the old machine, and this is very hard if you’re caught unprepared.

The good news is that there are cost-effective ways for small businesses to protect their data from catastrophic loss and get running again quickly.

• How prepared do I need to be?
• Do I have a written disaster recovery plan in place?
• Do I have offsite backup?
• Have I performed recovery testing lately?
• Do I have employees that can help in a disaster?

If you answered no to any single question, then you and your business are at a high risk of failure should a disaster strike your business.

Email or call us to schedule a free evaluation of your business and to see how we can you prepare for a disaster.