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The 3 Key Benefits of Having an IT Disaster Recovery Plan in Place
Nobody likes to consider the worst-case scenario but if 2020 has proven anything, it’s that you should always plan well in advance for it.
Companies that fail to draw up contingency plans for unlikely events often find themselves rudderless during hacks, fires, floods, power outages, and break-ins. Hardware itself doesn't have an infinite lifespan and computers can be notoriously temperamental. All of these factors can result in unexpected and financially devastating data losses.
However, you can put your very own insurance scheme in place with a Disaster Recovery Plan. Planning ahead by creating backups, designated recovery procedures, and secondary, you can mitigate the worst effects of an ‘act of God’ and get your networks and machines up and running again as quickly as possible, saving time, stress, and hard cash.
What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a report-format document that outlines how you'll respond in the event of various catastrophic local and global scenarios.
Which disasters you'll plan for will vary depending on the nature, location, and trade of your business. Most companies professionally audit their work and workplaces to determine their liabilities and where to prioritise spending money as a precautionary measure. In IT, this can include hacks, leaks, hardware downtime, and software failure.
Your DRP should outline which employees and third-parties will be responsible for what in the event of a disaster. Projected repair and replacement costs and a full inventory of known assets should also be present.
What are the benefits of having a plan in place?
1) Faster Recovery Times
Time wasted is money lost. If your employees can't be productive, you're not going to make anything. Companies that suffer extended downtime and shortfalls in trading due to IT outages see huge losses, lost customers, and extensive damage to their reputation. Getting back on track quickly and smoothly is key to overcoming a disaster. By putting the secondary infrastructure and data storage in place to recover as soon as the power is back on and your systems reset, you can save your business from the worst effects of the disaster.
2) Better Customer Retention and Quality of Service
Data loss and downtime can lose you, customers, in one of two ways: communication breakdown or sheer frustration. Without extensive backups, you'll have to spend time contacting known leads and rebuilding each order lost.
Customers will also seek alternatives to fill the gap if they know your business is experiencing technical difficulties for a prolonged period - particularly so if you work in a time-critical, business-to-business sector such as manufacturing. A DRP allows you to get your customer databases and day-to-day functionality back intact, minimising any client gripes.
3) Scalability
In the past, businesses often relied on simple, 'one-size-fits-all' recovery plans for their computing capacity. While having a set procedure always helps, today's IT experiences a more complex and diverse range of issues and faults. Having a targeted, tailored DRP in place allows you to compartmentalise your response, saving time, money, and effort to get your business back up to full capacity. Cloud integration also helps scale your recovery tech to the right level.
Just adding some inline comments here... I do feel, again, that we should be listed here a few specific services or M365 features that we offer here. We should have a mention of the services which aim to prevent disaster (I.e. protection and compliance services, and even things like WVD which keep data and content in the cloud) but there is also an element of getting back up and running quickly with our backup, replication and quick-to-spin-up cloud services
Managed IT Support from Fuse Collaboration
If you need help planning for the future of your IT infrastructure, talk to Fuse Collaboration today. We have extensive experience in maintaining, repairing, and restoring complex, diverse IT systems - virtually! Disaster Recovery Planning is a speciality. Call or email us to find out more.
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