Between data breaches, hacks, viruses, and even natural disasters, businesses face a multitude of risks. When these threats strike, they can cause company downtime, stolen consumer data, loss of revenue, public relations nightmares, and financial repercussions — just to name a few.
That’s why smart business owners plan for the worst by outlining thorough disaster recovery and business continuity plans. These plans detail the steps you and your employees should take in order to minimize damages following a disaster, along with a plan of action for getting your business back up and running as quickly as possible during the aftermath.
If you have these plans in place, you’re off to the right start. But with so many risks to prepare for, it’s easy to overlook (and forget to incorporate) some common strategies and tools every business continuity and disaster recovery plan should have. Here are 6 common things businesses forget to include that could be creating a holes in your continuity and recovery plans:
1. Failing to plan at all
It’s easy to brush off the need for having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. The likelihood of a disaster happening to your business can be written off as unlikely, or even next to impossible. But what if the impossible did happen to your business? How long could your company and its customers go without access to your data? How many days could your business survive being out of operation until the road to financial recovery would become too steep? How many customers could you afford to lose in the aftermath due to inadequate communication, or a public relations fall-out? Just because you think the potential for disaster is minimal doesn’t mean a disaster could never happen to your business. That’s the kind of thinking that makes businesses go under, even when a relatively small mishap occurs.
2. Not having cyber insurance
After factoring in direct damages and aftermath disruptions, cyber attacks cost businesses as much as $400 billion a year. With the high costs your business could face in the event of a disaster, you should have an insurance policy that includes cyber attack coverage so that your business won’t drown under the financial pressure. While there is an expense to purchase cyber insurance for your business, it’s often just a fraction of what you’d lose if your company were to face a cyber attack with no insurance. Cyber insurance plans can also keep your company covered under a variety of other first and third party expenses ranging from expenses incurred during downtime to providing credit card monitoring for your customers and more.
3. Limited data redundancy
No matter how your data is lost — whether due to natural disaster, virus, or any other human, physical, or online threat, you’ll need a way to reinstate the data you’ve lost in order to get back to business as usual as quickly as possible. This means your company’s data cannot live in one place. If your network goes down, or important data is lost, you’ll need to have multiple retrieval options in place to get it back quickly. To do this, you’ll need to have backups that are available both on and offline. Storing your backups in physical devices at your location is not enough. If those devices become damaged or stolen, your backup plan will crumble along with them. That’s why it’s critical to have a cloud backup of your most important data in place as well. If a disaster strikes your local devices, you’ll still be able to retrieve the information you need and restore it to a new or repaired device from the cloud.
4. Inadequate data recovery abilities
Having a reliable cloud backup in place is a start, but it’s what’s included in your cloud backup that will be the difference between a quick or sluggish recovery. A simple cloud storage solution, like Dropbox, won’t be comprehensive enough to restore the data your company needs to run. If you’re using a simple cloud storage or file syncing solution, your data can fall through the cracks due to inadequate version history lengths. Imagine this: you get a cryptolocker virus that encrypts your data, rendering it unreadable. You don’t realize this until after your 30 day version history window and are now unable to recover unchanged, uncorrupted versions of those files. This is just one of the many scenarios that make an enterprise cloud backup solution with unlimited previous file versions critical to the recovery of your data. For businesses with more complex data structures, a server grade cloud backup solution can be used to backup and restore servers, databases, and more, exactly as they’re intended. This is where a fully managed recovery and hosting service pre-emptively virtualizes your servers so that there is no waiting before you can use your cloud backup server and eliminate downtime.
5. Lack of proper reporting procedures
Whether purposeful or not, many cyber attacks go unreported. Many companies fear cyber attacks will damage their reputations and others simply aren’t aware of attacks, or don’t know how to properly report them. However, not reporting a hack or breach can negatively impact your revenues, customer retention and more. It’s imperative to notify the appropriate agencies (and your customers if their data is involved). Make sure your disaster recovery plan includes a list of personnel to contact in the event of a disaster, along with procedures for whom should be contacted for each scenario. Start by familiarizing yourself with the Security Breach Notification Laws in your state.
6. Not following formalities
Speaking of regulated industries — if you’re in one, your business may be required to shape your DR and BCPs according to ISO Standard 22301 as a demonstration of compliance with regulatory requirements. Before you decide to plan your own policies, make sure you’re in the clear to do so. Even if your business exists outside of regulatory requirements, your organization can still receive accredited certification by following these standards. The benefit of this is the ability to demonstrate to legislators, regulators, customers, and prospective customers that you’re adhering to good practices. Alternately, you can use these standards internally by measuring your plans against them.
You can start better protecting your company by patching these holes in your business continuity and disaster recovery plans. One of the best places to start is by investing in a secure cloud backup solution that will give you the data recovery abilities you need to overcome any data disaster, from viruses to human error, data breach and more. For a small business cloud backup solution with the unlimited versioning history you need to recover and restore any file version, try a small business cloud backup plan with Nordic Backup. For server virtualization options to reinstate your entire system without downtime, a server cloud backup solution will provide you with all the recovery options you need.
