When disaster strikes, is your business prepared?
Is your business prepared for a major disruption and ready with a plan of attack to mitigate lost revenue? In a world where we increasingly rely on digital data and transactions to do our jobs, a fire, data breach, or simply human error could result in a crippling effect on the health of your business.
Get active to reduce risk
Companies that actively work to reduce risk and put disaster recovery policies in place are much more likely to beat those odds.
Here are a few ways to prepare for the worst, and help your business bounce back quickly when disaster strikes:
- CONSIDER THE RISKS
The first step in preparing for the unexpected is to do a thorough risk assessment of your company’s vulnerabilities in a variety of scenarios. Think about things like natural disasters, hardware and software malfunctions, human error, cyberattacks, fraud, and other external environmental factors. Consider how such events would negatively impact productivity, revenue, customer data, or supply chain logistics and ways to reduce needed recovery time if these areas were impacted.
- PREPARE TO RESPOND
Involve decision-makers from across your business to assemble a disaster recovery team. The team should be involved in regular training on disaster recovery, keep the plan up-to-date, and be empowered to put the plan into action when necessary. If working with outside IT specialists, be sure to involve them as an active partner in planning information recovery protocols.
- TAKE PREVENTIVE MEASURES
Once you understand the risks, work to eliminate those that are within your control. A natural disaster or health crisis can not be prevented but it can prepared for. Your company's focus should be to ensure you are keeping digital information secure and recoverable should be an incident occur.
This can look like:
- Regularly training employees on data protection best practices
- Automatic, secure backups of data in an offsite or cloud-based storage solution
- Use of anti-virus software and firewall security measures
- Backup validation and verification on a regular basis
Rely on the experts
If your company has limited internal resources dedicated to cybersecurity or disaster recovery planning, Paul Jackson, CEO/Cybersecurity Specialist, and the rest of his team at Jackson Technologies offer comprehensive and customized solutions for businesses of any size.