Sunday, November 27th will go down in Calgary history as the first time the downtown core was shut down to all traffic due to the extremely high winds. Hopefully, it won’t go down in history as the day your business failed because of lack of business continuity planning and back-up and disaster recovery. Luckily the storm didn’t cause any injuries, but the potential for business disaster is high. Widespread power outages can wreak havoc on your office technology. If you don’t have a solid back-up plan in place AND TESTED regularly, you risk losing one of your most valuable assets… your data.

 

The storm could have resulted in much greater damage. Damage to infrastructure from falling trees and blown out windows can affect not only your physical location, but all of the data, systems and backups you have there. Increased fire risk due to monitoring systems going down and an overtaxed fire department are a very real possibility in these cases. The disasters can be natural, like the hurricane force winds Sunday, or man-made (remember the looting of businesses in Vancouver during the Stanley Cup finals?) And it’s not just your data that’s at risk – think of the downtime while you try to restore last month’s (corrupted or not tested) back-up. Every minute you spend trying to get back up and running is costing you money. And most companies significantly underestimate the amount of time it would take to get back up to speed. And by the time you realize that a back up and disaster recovery plan is essential, it’s usually too late.

 Studies have shown that 93% of all companies that experience a major data loss are out of business within 5 years. It can be impossible to recover from that loss. By implementing a back up and disaster recovery plan, you protect yourself from one of the few guarantees in life… something, someday, somewhere… WILL go wrong.

 

If you still don’t see the necessity for a business continuity plan, try to look at it like insurance for your car or home: you don’t EXPECT to have a car accident, or a sewer backup, or a tree fall on your house. But when it happens, you sure are thankful for that insurance. If you don’t insure your business continuity with a solid plan, you risk being one of those 93% percent of businesses who fail due to disaster.

 

Businesses don't plan to fail, they fail to plan.

 

If you would to know how Benson & Associates can take the guess work out of business continuity planning or back-up and disaster recovery plans, please give us a call at 1.877.247.1664 or email our help desk at helpdesk@bensonit.ca