Wouldn’t life be much simpler if we had a crystal ball telling us exactly when disaster was about to strike and advising us how to prevent it? Just ask British Airways management this morning!
Without this insight, however, it pays to be prepared for the worst. While some business managers and IT leaders recognise the need to put the appropriate safeguards in place, others are apparently prepared to take risks with their IT estate if it means they can cut back on costs.
Finances are understandably important for businesses of all sizes, but when it comes to your IT systems and your reliance on them, can it really pay to cut corners on your disaster recovery?
[easy-tweet tweet=”Some Business Managers are prepared to take risks with IT estate if it means they can cut costs.” user=”@m7msuk” hashtags=”cloud, tech, IT”]
In order to answer this question, businesses must first have a clear grasp of the dependence their organisation has on all their different IT systems and the cost incurred for each hour or day they are without them. From a purely financial point of view, these costs will vary depending on the type and scale of disruption facing your company, but they are always unwelcome.
Take a security breach, for example. These are seemingly becoming more and more commonplace, with headlines emerging on an almost daily basis. Despite this, some companies still adopt an “it won’t happen to me” attitude – until it’s too late.
According to recent research, IT security breaches are set to cost businesses $2.1 trillion globally by 2019. As it is impossible to protect against the many threats facing modern businesses, an organisation’s disaster recovery plan can offer a safety net that’s better than an insurance policy. In most cases it will also probably reduce the cost of your insurance policy.
Even if you are fortunate enough to avoid an IT security breach there are still plenty of reasons to invest in disaster recovery.
Disruption comes in many forms, from natural disasters, equipment failure to internal mistakes. Predicting when one of these is going to occur is virtually impossible, but that doesn’t mean that customers won’t start looking elsewhere if your recovery strategy means they can’t transact with you for a numbers of hours or days.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Disruption comes in many forms, from natural disasters, equipment failure to internal mistakes.” user=”@m7msuk” hashtags=”cloud, tech, IT”]
In today’s fast-paced digital world, even the smallest amount of IT downtime can be enough to send your customers to one of your competitors. Lost business like this can be difficult to recover, but with the right disaster recovery plan in place, your customers needn’t know about the disruption at all. Instead, business continuity planning combined with the correct replication tools can provide a seamless solution to ensure your employees, clients and customers continue to receive the level of service that they usually expect.
However, disaster recovery cannot simply be implemented as an afterthought or considered as a necessary nuisance to help pass a company audit.
If organisations feel like they do not have the time, resources or expertise to implement a robust disaster recovery plan of their own, they should instead source a managed service provider (MSP) that can. For a monthly subscription fee, M7 Managed Services can deliver a DR plan that ultimately could be the difference between a business continuing or failing. By planning ahead businesses might avoid financial ruin or reputational damage through future IT failures.
For those companies seeking a solution M7 is now offering a DR Solution free trial so businesses can appreciate the benefits that DR offers, without having to invest beforehand. Unless you have a corporate crystal ball, going without a disaster recovery solution is almost certainly a risk that simply isn’t worth your business taking.