Why Your Small Business Needs A Disaster Recovery Plan
Why Should Your Small Business Care About Having A Disaster Recovery Plan?
Your business and marketing plan, all of your content you made, your customer database, your recipes, manuals, and photos are gone forever. You’ve spent hours, months, years, and decades getting your business to this point. Only for some sort of disaster to make you close your business.
If your part of the 75% of small business that don’t have a disaster recovery plan, you are putting your business at risk. A disaster recovery plan is a plan that outlines the polices, process, and procedures that will keep your business running in case of a disaster.
There are two different types of disasters that your small business can experience; a natural disaster or a man-made disaster. A natural disaster consists of earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, flooding, fires, and other naturally occurring weather conditions. Man-made disasters include viruses, infrastructure or power failure, hazardous material spills, and acts of terrorism. You can’t always predict when a disaster strikes. You can however have a plan for how to deal with the disaster. Almost 40% of small businesses close after a disaster.
How Are Disaster Recovery Plans Made?
There is 6 steps to creating an effective disaster recovery plan.
- Analysis
- Design
- Implementation
- Testing
- Acceptance
- Maintenance
These 6 steps make sure that your small business disaster recover plan currently works, and will continue to work as you make updates to your business.
Analysis
They’re are two steps that we need to do to have a complete analysis. First we need to consider any possible risks. Besides natural and made-made disasters we also need to consider power outages, workplace violence, damage or loss of information technology, and break down to machines, systems, and equipment.
After we consider all possible risks we determine what pieces of data are needed to keep your business up and running.
Design
Now that we know your business’s vital data and the possible risks that could happen we can create a plan. When you design the disaster recovery plan what you put in depends on what your business needs. Along with what would be the most effective for your small business.
Implementation
The next step is implementation. Implementation is taking the plan that was designed and starting it. Each small bussiness disaster recovery plan is different. Depending on how your business’s disaster recovery plan was designed, the plan needs to be implemented differently.
Testing
In school you had fire drills. The fire drills made sure students knew where to go and what to do. The teachers and administration could see the current safety issues and any other problems in their plan. This is the same concept testing your disaster recovery plan is based on.
Your small business role plays that a disaster has happened. You and your team do your parts to make sure the plan that was designed and implemented works. If it works you can move on to the next step. If your plan has a few bugs to work out, you can redesign your plan. This ensures your business is not like the 75% of business that believe their plan is inadequate.
Acceptance
Now that your small business disaster recovery plan works. You can accept and use that plan, for your small business.
Maintenance
You have a great, working disaster recovery plan. Your small business just needs to maintain the plan so it’s up to date. As your small business changes over time and gets new data, equipment, and systems, new possible risks exist, and members of your team leave and are added you need to modify your plan.
Don’t Have The Time To Create Your Small Business Disaster Recovery Plan
We understand that adding a disaster recover plan to your small business’s list of things to do might be the last thing you want to do. However having a small business disaster recovery plan will save your business one day. Your business doesn’t need to learn about the most effective ways to make a disaster recover plan or even make one. You can get a disaster recovery plan from a company that has years of experience and the resources available to create an effective plan for you. This way it’s not another item on your to do list to worry about.
Netsonic does offer disaster recovery plans. We can create a small business disaster plan that fits your business needs.
