Nonprofits, Creative Agencies and Tech Startups Outsourced Technology: How to recover faster from disaster in the cloud

Business continuity plans, e.g., disaster recovery plans, are critical to every company’s long term survival.  

We hope you already have one in place. However, if you don’t, know that you’re not alone. (If you’re looking for some guidelines on what to include in your business continuity plans see AT&T’s checklist here.) 

 Around 75% of small businesses don’t have a disaster recovery plan objective, according to a survey by PhoenixNAP, a global IT services firm.  

If you’re not part of the 25% of businesses with a business continuity plan, please keep these stats in mind: 

• 93% of companies without a disaster recovery plan who suffer a major data disaster are out of business within one year 
• More than 50% of companies experienced a downtime event in the past five years that lasted longer than a full workday 
• Unplanned downtime can cost up to $17,244 per minute, with a low-end estimate of $926 per minute 
• More than 50% of businesses don’t have the budget to recover from an attack 
• Two thirds of survey respondents believed that a significant security breach could occur at their organization next year 

Business continuity plans aren’t just for when environmental disasters strike. As we’ve all seen during the pandemic, one adverse event can wipe an entire business out. This is what makes continuity plans so essential to a company’s longevity. A strong plan will guide your business through all kinds of issues from water main breaks to security breaches to terrorist attacks. They ensure that not only are your most valuable assets – your people, data and devices are protected, but that your response is streamlined and swift. 

Again, we got a taste of what can happen when we don’t plan ahead. For example, during the height of COVID, most companies were forced to quickly migrate their business operations to the cloud to survive albeit remotely. Though the transition was brutal and a cybersecurity nightmare, the silver lining was this: The cloud makes for a great disaster recovery ally. 

Traditional disaster recovery (DR) plans tend to be complex affairs based on fixed work locales. They rely primarily on creating a redundant data center that is stored off site, which you’re then on the hook to maintain and support yourself.  

Disaster recovery in the cloud is fast, flexible, friendly and scalable.   

Benefits of disaster recovery in the cloud: 

• Recovery, oftentimes, only requires a device and the internet  
• Cloud storage acts as a secondary disaster recovery site itself so no more need for an additional physical location to store secondary data storage drives  
• You can store data across multiple locations or create an additional backup 

The beauty of NOT having a business continuity plan is there is no better time to start than right now.  

With a proven, strategic approach like ours, we’ll guide you to success so you’ll be able to scale up or down based on your company needs, create cost-efficiencies by reducing the number of backup devices needed, and develop an environment where you have a single point of deployment for your IT department to monitor your recovery operations. 

If you’re looking for more support in creating your business continuity plan, we invite you to schedule a free consult with Gerson here.