Why Your Small Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan
April 17, 2012 by Richard Turley
In the IT world, it is commonly accepted that businesses need a disaster recovery plan. This almost goes without saying for large corporations, but it is equally true of smaller enterprises. And yet, astoundingly, many small companies do not have such a plan in place—and if they do, they do not know how to use it.
Earlier in 2012, Business News Daily reported some staggering statistics to underscore this point. Their study found that 90% of all small and medium-sized businesses did not have adequate disaster recovery plans in place. If you own a business, there is no time like the present to evaluate your own disaster recovery needs.
What is Disaster Recovery?
A disaster recovery plan is designed to ensure business continuity. That is, a disaster recovery plan is something meant to protect against the loss of business critical data. This data might include any information your business needs, and could not recover were it to be lost. Some examples range from customer information and e-mail correspondence, to HR or inventory records.
An IT service provider can work with your business to provide the necessary disaster recovery measures, which may look a bit different from one business to the next. The bottom line, though, is that your IT solutions team should provide a way for your business to quickly recover from a disaster or an emergency. This means getting hardware and software up and running smoothly, as well as resuming normal business communication.
Why Business Need Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery is vital for preserving business critical information. As you can imagine, this information is both critical and irreplaceable. And yet, many businesses are not prepared to respond should something cause this information to be lost. Data loss happens all the time, possibly because of human error. It could also be caused by a computer virus, fire or water damage, or simply a power outage!
This kind of thing happens more often than business owners might like to admit. In fact, the Northern Indiana area experienced tornadoes as recently as a month ago. Storms of that magnitude surely come with the possibility of disastrous business loss, underscoring the supreme importance of professional disaster recovery services.
What to Do About IT Disaster Recovery
Naturally, the solution is to contact a disaster recovery business or IT firm to help you get a business continuity/disaster recovery plan in place. IT consultants and continuity companies can help ensure that you have remote backup and recovery procedures available to you.
Choosing to hire a professional firm is important, because they can ensure that you not only have a plan, but that the plan is tested. Control-Z, which offers IT consulting in Indianapolis, can not only design and implement a business continuity plan, but also test it. They can make certain that you have a failsafe disaster recovery plan in place at all times. Ultimately, these are the IT solutions Indianapolis companies need—ways to ensure that business needs are not compromised by technical or human errors.