With the rising waters of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Disaster Recovery has come to the forefront of our minds. It’s one of those things like life insurance that you just don’t want to talk about. It’s easy to get apathetic and feel like it’s money that could be spent on other seemingly more important things in your normal day to day business life.
We insure our homes, our cars, our health for a sense of security in our personal lives, knowing that if anything out of the ordinary happened we would be alright. As business owners, we insure our buildings, our inventory, our fleet so that we’re protected from unforeseen events. It seems like enough, right?
But what about your information? Are you insuring your day to day business records?
What about your communications? Do you have insurance that guarantees your clientele can always reach you?
Can you continue to business if you have a blizzard and your staff can’t make it to work?
This is what we are talking about when we begin the Disaster Recovery discussion.
Disaster recovery (DR) is an area of security planning that aims to protect your whole organization from the effects of a significant negative event. DR allows you to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disaster – or even just a major inconvenience.
A few questions you can ask yourself to see if you’ve taken adequate steps to protect your business in the case of a catastrophic event:
- Can I still access my data base?
- Can my employees get to work?
- Can my employees effectively work from an off-site location?
- Can my customers contact me?
- Can a transition from on-site to off-site be made easily?
Making assumptions that your organization is immune to natural disasters can be an extremely costly mistake. Some businesses never fully recover from it. Would yours?