How To Choose A Disaster Recovery Plan

Does your business have a disaster recovery plan? Without one, the business could be extremely vulnerable. As of 2013, 43% of companies in the United States said they had experienced some sort of data breach. Because these breaches typically happen to IT systems that we can’t see or touch it is sometimes difficult to imagine the amount of damage they can cause. In reality, when a company experiences a data breach, the typical cost of recovery include: reputation and brand management, lost productivity, lost revenue, forensics, technical support, and compliance regulatory costs. As you can see, these costs could add up fast. The cost alone is one of the main reasons to ensure that your business is protected with a disaster recovery plan. Here are some of the key features to look for when purchasing new IT systems and/or disaster plans:

1. Customer Service and Reliability – As a business owner you probably hold all of your vendors to high standards. Without them you wouldn’t be able to produce the highest quality product, right? The same standards apply to IT business services; you need to be confident that you can rely on your vendor in case disaster strikes. Statistics show that on average companies are attacked a little less than 17,000 times per year, and that many of those attacks result in a significant data breach. If this happens to you, make sure you have a reliable vendor managing your disaster recovery plan.


2. Industry Knowledge – Another crucial component of choosing a network management vendor is making sure they understand your industry. Without that they won’t know how to best protect you. Obviously the disaster recovery plan for business in the education industries will be much different than that of a business focused on manufacturing. Some businesses today that have high incoming and outgoing call volumes are choosing a popular telephone option known as voip phone systems. Put simply, voip phone systems transmit calls over an IP address rather than the typical telephone networks. This is just one more way to make sure your business information is secure.

3. Experience – This may seem self explanatory, but in the grand scheme of things it makes a huge difference. If, for some terrible reason, your business was struck by a large data breach it is incredibly important for your disaster recovery plan vendor to have the experience to handle the ins and outs of whatever the remedy may be. Without that, the recovery could take much longer than it should.

Believe it or not, disaster recovery plans are used every day. In the U.S. alone 140,000 hard drives crash and patrons lose 12,000 laptops in airports every week. From a business perspective these may seem like small scale “disasters,” but each incident truly warrants having a solid security system in place. Make sure your business is prepared for whatever breach may be lurking today by implementing a disaster recover plan.