Top 4 main reasons why you should care about business continuity plan

Did you know that disasters can happen at anytime, anywhere & to anyone?

So is your business prepared for the unexpected?

Do you have a business continuity plan in place?

Many that are not prepared close their doors within a year.

IT plays an important role in businesses of all stripes. Usually, these systems silently run in the background, providing employees the tools as well as information needed to do their task.

But as said earlier, disaster can strike at any time: fire, earthquake, flood, hackers, terrorism, viruses,  hardware failure, power failure, even a malicious employee.

Have you considered the impact of such events on your company? An outage of 1 or more critical systems can cause a significant loss of revenue, irreparable damage to customer relationships & may also lead to shuttering your business!

Although most large organizations have already formalized business continuity plans in place, many SMBs are still not adequately prepared for a disaster.

According to a research, around 20% of organizations will suffer flood, fire, power failures, or hardware disaster. Out of those without a Disaster Recovery Plan:

• 80% will fail within a year.
• 43% will never re-open.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, 93% of businesses that experience a significant data loss are out of business within 5 years .

Imation noticed that 30% of organizations surveyed had no Disaster Recovery Plan in place, & around 40% indicated they have a plan yet don’t test or update it yearly.

IBM found that only 8% of Internet businesses are prepared for disaster.

Also, it has been found that major systems downtime can cost companies upwards of $90,000 per hour.

So what are you waiting for? You must have a Business Continuity plan before disaster strikes.

Here are 4 main reasons why you should care about business continuity plan:

Downtime is really very costly

What would happen if your customers or employees lose access to critical applications & data? There will be a direct impact on your productivity as well as revenue. While this sounds obvious, many businesses don’t consider the actual downtime costs. Some modern Business continuity & disaster recovery (BCDR or BC/DR) products provide the ability to run applications from backup instances of virtual servers. This enables users to continue operations while primary application servers are restored. Choosing a BC/DR solution aimed at minimizing downtime makes good business sense.

Backup alone is not enough!

Although backup is highly important for protecting your business, it’s not enough to keep your business running in an event of outage.

The most commonly used tape-backups are no longer enough as more than 50 percent of tape backups fail. Data conversion with traditional backup methods like tape, disk also have a time-consuming data conversion process which may take weeks. A business continuity plan ensures data protection, security as well as  instant recovery in an event of a disaster & reduce the risk of critical data loss & an increased downtime.

Moreover, traditional backup methods require backup & storage of data in many locations. With modern business continuity solutions, your image-based backup will be automatically stored in multiple locations without you having to manually ship tapes offsite.

Most times disasters are not natural!

Most IT downtime is a result of every day actions like intentional or accidental data deletion, poor security habits as well as damage to computer hardware.

A CompTIA study found that around 94 percent of respondents log into public wifi routinely, in spite of security risks. Around 69 percent of this group accesses work data over public wifi. A virus or ransomware attack can stop operations as easily as a power surge or tornado. These disasters are mainly a result of human error, which is unpreventable.

Having detailed plans in place makes you stronger against the minor mishaps of everyday life.

Disasters can ruin your business

Around 49 percent of small business owners estimate that it would take them a minimum of 3 months to recover from a disaster. Just think about all that lost money & time. Also many business that do not have a proper business continuity plan completely go out of business.

A business continuity plan can help you make sure that you don’t go out of business & that you recover much faster.

Remember that you should plan for a disruption or catastrophic event when your business is going well, not when a disaster strikes. Having a proper business continuity plan in place can help mitigate risk & it is one of the best investments your business can make.