Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. It’s not just catastrophic events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, but also incidents such as cyber-attacks, equipment failures and even terrorism that can be classified as disasters.

Companies and organizations prepare by creating disaster recovery plans that detail actions to take and processes to follow to resume mission-critical functions quickly and without major losses in revenues or business.

In the IT space, disaster recovery focuses on the IT systems that help support critical business functions. The term “business continuity” is often associated with disaster recovery, but the two terms aren’t completely interchangeable. Disaster recovery is a part of business continuity, which focuses more on keeping all aspects of a business running despite the disaster. Because IT systems these days are so critical to the success of the business, disaster recovery is a main pillar of the business continuity process.

Economic and operational losses can overwhelm unprepared businesses. One hour of downtime can cost small companies as much as $8,000, midsize companies up to $74,000, and large enterprises up to $700,000, according to a 2015 report from the IT Disaster Recovery Preparedness (DRP) Council.

Zetta

Another survey from disaster recovery service provider Zetta showed that more than half of companies surveyed (54%) had experienced a downtime event that lasted more than eight hours over the past five years. Two-thirds of those surveyed said their businesses would lose more than $20,000 for every day of downtime.

Even if your company already has a disaster recovery plan of some sort, it may be time for an update. If your company doesn’t have one, and if you’ve been handed the task of coming up with one, don’t jump in feet first without doing a risk assessment. Identify vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and where things could go wrong. A prerequisite is knowing what your IT infrastructure looks like.

Open Technologies is a leader in the disaster recovery space.  Give us a call today, or contact us here, we'll set up a meeting and review your needs and make recommendations on how best to address them.