How Prepared Are You? What 2017 Taught Us About Disaster Recovery

Natural disasters, breaches and hackers, oh my! What will happen to your business if tragedy strikes? If your answer is a long silence and a shrug, it’s time to think seriously about an IT disaster recovery plan. Are you prepared for the following scenarios?

• Flooding swamps your computers and servers, leaving your critical data irretrievable
• A breach compromises your consumers’ critical data – and goes undetected for months
• A negligent employee makes an error that shuts down dozens of your servers
• Hackers lock your computers with ransomware and demand money to release your files

Do these events sound unlikely? The companies affected by them in 2017 would disagree. Businesses of all sizes are vulnerable to disasters – and 30 percent of them have no disaster recovery strategy in place. Fortunately, you can protect your business with these four lessons:

• Give Your Data a Home in the Cloud – Your hardware can be ruined in a natural disaster, destroying an untold amount of critical data. Ensure that employees and customers alike maintain uninterrupted access by migrating data to a public, private or hybrid cloud.
• Shield Yourself Against Breaches – Discovering a breach months after it starts is a surefire way to lose customer trust and tank your reputation. Institute proactive monitoring for data breaches so you can handle them quickly and minimize the damage.
• Look Inward at Your Team – Data breaches start with external attacks, right? Wrong. The leading cause of breaches at small and medium-sized businesses is employee negligence. While you can’t program your team to follow procedure every time, you can train them to make security a priority end-to-end – and implement redundancies to avoid those “oops” moments.
• Don’t Let Your Software Lapse – Developers offer updates and patches for a reason – cyber criminals can use vulnerabilities in software to wreak havoc on your systems. Fight ransomware and other attacks by installing updates as soon as they become available. And make sure that your vital data and applications can still be accessed elsewhere, even if your computers are targeted by hackers.

 In the event of a disaster, 90 percent of businesses without a recovery plan fail. But you can survive the unexpected with a comprehensive IT disaster recovery plan tailored to your needs. Ready to get serious about protecting your business? Contact us  to talk to our experts about IT disaster recovery.