A business continuity plan empowers an organization to respond to threats and disasters without crippling its core business operations.

The goal is to assemble a set of policies, processes, and procedures that help you survive an emergency while suffering as little downtime as possible. At the end of the day, failure to prepare can be a costly situation.

Business Continuity is Essential.

Businesses must be able to quickly and efficiently alleviate issues at hand, reboot their systems, and ensure clients are properly notified. In order to do this, processes must be documented and practiced to reduce the amount of inactivity between the incident and restoration. Hence why business continuity planning is so critical.

Your Business Has a Lot to Lose.

Plain and simple – unplanned outages can hit companies hard by obstructing their ability to produce. And not even the biggest of enterprise giants are safe. Research shows that 59% of Fortune 500 Companies suffer from at least 1.6 hours of downtime per week, which can potentially translate to a loss of $46 million in labor costs per year. The losses can add up quickly due to lack of production, which can result in failure to generate revenue, execute marketing strategies, and deliver services.

Truth is, modern day businesses are heavily dependent on their IT systems and without them, they stand to lose big. But before you make your plan, it is probably useful to know why you are making one in the first place. Ultimately, they are needed to keep your essential business functions working with the ability to quickly recover following a serious incident or disaster

What are the Leading Causes of Data Loss?

There are several causes of data loss to be aware of.

• Hardware malfunctions – Includes electrical failure, media crashes and controller failure.
• Human error – Includes accidental deletion of emails on servers and trauma caused by accidental falls and spills.
• Software Corruption – Includes failed backups and configuration complexity.
• IT equipment failure – faulty equipment and security breaches causing widespread outages
• Computer viruses – Includes boot sector, file infecting and polymorphic viruses.
• Weather related disasters– Includes fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.

Prevent Downtime, Loss of Revenue, and Potential Bankruptcy

Most businesses cannot afford to have any downtime without it significantly affecting the company’s profits. In some cases, organizations often find themselves measuring downtime by individual factors as:

• Brand damage
• Loss of customer loyalty
• Loss of competitive edge
• Employee moral

Having a disaster recover plan in place ensures that the business will run again as quickly as possible, thereby minimizing any downtime and loss of revenue.

Plan for the Worst

It is always best to have a contingency plan in place should the worst-case scenario occur. When you suffer a data breach, a fire, a flood, a power outage or any other serious setbacks beyond your control, having a plan in place will help to ensure continued operations and minimize potential losses.

Disaster Recovery

This typically refers to an organization’s plans for protecting its IT infrastructure during a disaster and returning it quickly to operation afterward. In this case, infrastructure refers primarily to servers and databases. Protecting these components involves measures such as replicating databases, having remote backup sites and maintaining backup sites where the equipment can operate.

What Should You Do Now?

Chances are that you feel concerned if you have not already established a plan. You should look into finding the appropriate software to help protect your business, including:

• Protecting your operations from systems failure
• Maximizing server and network uptime
• Utilizing the most advanced modern technologies

With these implemented, you can be sure that your systems will be protected for the long term. Contact Synchroworks today help protect your data and keep your business running when such incidents occur.