The Benefits of a Disaster Recovery Plan

In order to assess whether or not your business would benefit from a disaster recovery plan, you really just need to answer one question: What would the impact on the business be if all data were lost? For most businesses, the answer would be that the loss of data would be crippling, and business would be at a virtual standstill. If that is the case for your business, it’s important to put a disaster recovery plan in place now.

However, many factors need to be considered before you enter into data recovery plan mode. For example:

  • What data is the most critical and should be recovered first?
  • What is an acceptable time frame before your business should be up and running again? One hour? One day?
  • How far back should the data continue to be collected? One minute? One hour? One week?
  • What type of disaster do you need to protect against? Electrical? Fire? Hurricane?
  • What kind of financial loss would you incur? The cost of your disaster recovery plan should not exceed the expense you would incur from the loss of data.

In addition to these questions, consider that your data recovery plan should include considerations about performance ability once your business has recovered. If your disaster site is identical to your original site, that’s fine; but if it’s different, and most of the time it will be, you need to consider the difference in transaction times while you’re running your business from the recovery site. Of course, this is not something that will need to be taken into consideration for every situation.

We cannot predict the future, and no one should leave their business records, transactions, financial information, and other critical data exposed to potential loss. It is a devastating proposition for any business, because it is that very data that drives our businesses. If you don’t have one already, look into a data disaster recovery plan. It could literally save your business.

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