LogicMonitor 2019 revealed that a whopping 96% of companies have experienced at least one outage in the past three years and 95% had experienced at least one brownout. Outages and brownouts cause the loss of revenue, compliance failure, and productivity loss.
What does this tell us?
It tells us that the world is unpredictable, and anything could happen.
Every day, businesses rely on files, documents, applications, and existing data to function. What happens when businesses suddenly lost access to all of these? When disaster strikes, every minute your company is without data, could cost your business resources, money, and you may lose customers.
The Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council found that nearly three quarters of organizations worldwide are not protecting their data and systems properly.
To protect your company from data loss, you must plan ahead. Create a disaster recovery plan to restore your data when it is lost to reduce your company downtime, and to get your business up and running again.
WHAT COULD HAPPEN IF A COMPANY DO NOT HAVE A DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN?
1. Business Continuity Will Be Affected
When there is a disruption that affect the business, it will slow down productivity and damage countless aspects of the company. Sale conversions stop, customer services suffer, and the impact of the disruption will continue to grow. This threatens not only your company’s daily profit margin, but also your employees’ productivity.
Up to 75% of businesses fail within three years after a major disaster. The good news is that with a disaster recovery plan in place, companies can resume business activities with minimal losses.
2. Financial And Reputation Loss
Not having a disaster recovery plan in place can put the organisation at risk of high financial costs, reputation loss and even greater risks to the customers. Data breaches, server downtime, weather emergencies and other disasters can be very costly, especially when your company do not have a plan to mitigate these financial damages.
Your customers might be able to accept that an incident happened, but they also expect your business to quickly respond to all disruptions. The way your company responds to a crisis can make or break your reputation.
3. Extra Expenditure
Some companies opt to have no disaster recovery plan at all because the price can be costly. This decision, however, can end up costing your company a lot more. If you are not prepared, the loss after a disaster can have a much greater financial toll than the cost of being well prepared.
The longer the downtime, the higher the losses. Having a business continuity plan that covers all your bases can help you to reduce business downtime and improve Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
WHAT CAN YOU DO NOW TO ENSURE BUSINESS CONTINUITY?
Identify your potential risks
Being in Malaysia, thunderstorm, flooding and fire will be the potential risks. A severe thunderstorm can knock down power lines, resulting in power outages, and flooding could prevent your employees from commuting to work.
Let’s not forget, that human error is also nearly impossible to be completely prevented. It could be simple negligence on the technician part, or a minor accident that could potentially knock out your company network or database. E.g., Amazon massive AWS outage was caused by human error, which one incorrect command could cause the whole network to suffer.
Cyberattacks are still on the rise, and the threat they pose against company data and downtime is very high. E.g., Ransomware WannaCry is a ransomware worm that spread rapidly across several computer networks in May 2017. After infecting a Windows computer, it encrypts files on the PC’s hard drive, making them impossible for user to access. It then demands a ransom payment in bitcoin in order to decrypt them.
Assess your operations and how well prepared is your business
Are there any flaws in your operations? For example, do you have a plan for employees who cannot work at the office due to pandemic restrictions or quarantine? How do your company communicate and collaborate with your employees that work from home or remotely?
This is where cloud computing can really help. Cloud professionals such as Cloudify.Asia can provide you the right foundation and solutions you need, in order to keep your business on going and connected.
Ask for recommendations and suggestions from trusted cloud professionals
Speak to an expert that has the right knowledge and skills in business continuity preparations and executions. Cloud professionals will assess, and custom made a disaster recovery plan that is well suited to your business and budget, to minimize the downtime for business continuity. Knowing your company is backed by cloud professionals will give you a peace of mind knowing that no matter what happens, they will be there for you. Check out our Disaster Recovery use cases!
Disaster Recovery Plan & Business Continuity: Summary
There are many events that could knock out your entire company network or database. The chances of these disasters affecting your business will be more severe if no disaster recovery plan is being implemented. Companies that experience major data loss will go out of business. For all the reasons above, you need a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan (BDR).
Written by Joshanna Tan | Cloud Commercial Designer