Disaster Recovery: 6 ways to minimize risks

Protecting your business operations against natural calamities and incidents is never more important than today. Natural disasters like tornadoes, ice storms, flooding, can be even more catastrophic. But less than 25% of businesses have at least a disaster recovery plan, let alone BCP. The probable ramifications can be beyond repair.

More than 50% of companies lack strategies to continue operations in emergency scenarios, like the COVID pandemic. And nearly 100,000 businesses were forced to shut up shop during the period.

For instance, multiple areas in New Jersey are declared disaster-prone. Organizations or offices geographically positioned in such locales should conclusively consider approaching and leveraging disaster management and business continuity services in New Jersey.

Simply put, a disaster management plan is the set of protocols a business follows to safeguard against process, data, and asset loss when faced with a natural disaster.

$100,000 – Average hourly losses due to infrastructure failure.

Business Continuity Planning or BCP, on the other hand, is the stepwise actions that the business follows to continue operational processes and revenue generation post-disaster.

Any natural calamity will force a business to temporarily suspend client services and vendor relationships, for starters. With BCP, this downtime can be substantially reduced with contingencies put in place beforehand to help continue business operations. But BCP only follows up from disaster management protocols. Your business needs to secure data, assets, and other resources first before it can re-deploy via BCP contingencies.

Before you opt for business continuity services in New Jersey, Atlanta or elsewhere, here are a few actionable pointers to help you understand what you and your team need to do when faced with such a scenario.

Emergency response procedures are designed as a set of protocols the business needs to follow to reduce immediate risks of valuable assets such as data, physical assets like servers, goods, hardware, etc.

Know that how well your business reduces losses caused by a natural disaster depends on the planned disaster response of your on-floor workforce.

Identify risks and create emergency response protocols accordingly, e.g. –

• Evacuation policies with maps and routes
• Emergency contacts
• Delegating on-site asset recovery and essential tasks
• Delegating rescue and medical duties or response protocols

Emergency response is all about sticking to a plan aimed at reducing damages while highlighting employee security.

After following disaster management protocols and recovering maximum business assets, up next is reinstating operational processes. This is where contingencies from the disaster recovery plan and BCP kick in.

Continuing business operations require turnkey solutions for business essential processes. Related contingencies may include recovering and backing up data at a remote data center, initializing a remote and virtual workspace structure to reinstate customer and vendor communications, among others.

Connecting disaster recovery protocols and backups with your BCP helps achieve minimal downtime and loss of productivity. For instance, setting up a data backup solution to recover essential data that you will need to restart fundamental business operations like comms and SaaS can help you drastically minimize downtime.

Outsourcing certain business processes post disaster recovery can be the key; a highly valued action point in almost any BCP.

As per surveys, 45% of businesses reported hardware failure followed by loss of power and software failure at 35% as aftermaths of a natural disaster. Data corruption is another common bottleneck.

Referring to managed IT services New Jersey for business continuity will help access turnkey solutions for remote virtual workspace/s, other than the necessary network, hardware, and software support, essentials to get business processes up and running.

Simply, if your office space is compromised due to a natural disaster, managed IT services can help you with data recovery, data backup, network support, managed Wi-Fi, software support, and hardware support. These are all you need to start getting work done again.

75% of businesses are underinsured and 40% have no insurance coverage.

As such, you should have insurance plans for your business with specific clauses for damages caused by natural disasters.  To make the best of insurance coverage, however, you must provide an accurate estimate of damages.

Maintaining properly updated asset inventories helps make sure that you get maximum insurance coverage. A detailed listing including assets along with serial numbers or other relative information for easier identification can play a big role in the total insurance outgo.

On-point BCP will include contingencies to manage business cash flow. Whether you refer to an MSP to outsource your IT requirements or not, you may need a line of credit to meet business expenses especially when you know that both revenue and income will take a hit.

Post-disaster, businesses aiming to maintain operations and productivity often fall short in cash and take emergency measures reactively. Instead, be proactive and optimize the revised operational process with necessary integrations and upgrades to augment the enforced changes.

Disaster management is highly dependent on response times other than BCP touchpoints. Testing disaster recovery protocols with practice runs annually or bi-annually improves preparedness and helps find loopholes that can potentially disrupt recovery.

Disaster management and on-point BCP can make or break businesses. Only a handful do manage to come back from natural disasters. Preemptive strategies, contingencies, and solutions can limit loss of productivity and help sustainable recovery over time.