Top 10 Reasons You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan
Top 10 Reasons You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan
Most individuals consider a disaster a hurricane, tornado, flood or earthquake. The truth is a disaster is any event that prevents your business from accessing the data and systems it needs to operate, including regional power outages, cyber attacks, employee sabotage and hardware failure. Below are 10 reasons you should consider a Disaster Recovery Plan.
- Because you can’t afford downtime. 20% of businesses experience a failure (fire, flood, power outage, natural disaster, etc.) in any given year, and 80% of those businesses will go under in just over a year. With IT downtime costs estimated at $26.5 Billion in lost revenue, your customers can’t afford not to have a disaster recovery plan in place.
- Because your customers and prospects expect it. Downtime means a lack of availability to your customers and a loss of business in the immediate and possibly long term.
- Because you spent a lot of time building your brand, you need to protect it. Downtime and lost data can ruin reputation, brand and diminish trust that can result in lost revenue, yet only 35% of small and medium sized enterprises have a DR plan in place. Are you rolling the dice with their brand?
- Because Mother Nature does not play favorites. Natural disasters have cost the global economy $2.5 Trillion since 2000. Virtually every area of the United States is subject to some sort of disaster whether it be flood, fire, hurricane or tornado. You shouldn’t leave their businesses’ well-being up to chance.
- Because machines break. You can buy the best equipment on the market but that does not safe guard you from malfunctions, lemons and breaks. 99% of IT professionals have experienced a hardware failure.
- Because we live in an always on world that requires always on capabilities. 72% of web users report abandoning a company website for a competitor’s due to frustrations with the site. When a website goes down, online shoppers are not willing to wait for the unknown time at which the site will be back online. If you aren’t protecting your internet and network you leave the door wide open for their competitors.
- Because compliance and regulations require it. 65% of companies need to produce DR reports for things such as compliance. Disaster Recovery helps safeguarding data required by HIPAA regulations regarding record keeping & BIA (business impact analysis).
- Because you can’t predict what data might be lost and the value it had for your company’s well-being. 43% of companies were immediately put out of business by a “major loss” of computer records, and another 51% permanently closed their doors within two years — leaving a mere six percent “survival” rate.
- Because it will save you money. Are you running duplicate sites, multiple servers, all to ensure if something happens to one they have another? Consider the cost savings by implementing virtual machines that can recover data in case of disaster. Before virtualization, disaster recovery would have cost at least three times as much because an organization needed to have multiple data centers, specialized software and large network connections.
- Because we’re all human. Humans make mistakes. 80% of unplanned outages are due to ill-planned changes made by administrators and 60% of availability and performance errors are the result of misconfigurations.