Hurricane seasons is upon us and the lines at the grocery stores are getting longer as people stock up on essentials to weather the storm. From a business perspective, hurricanes can wreak havoc with power outages and flooding. However, there are much bigger threats that are year-round, especially for businesses that rely on power and connectivity to service their customers.
Think about the organizational impact when your office or operations are taken down: lost revenue, insurance ramifications, audit implications, decreased productivity, customer frustration, lost service, and damaged confidence.
Environmental disasters can certainly be a cause of downtime, but they only come in at number 2 of most likely threats. The 2018 Disaster Recovery Technologies Survey looked at causes of business downtime and over 1/3 (36.5%) of the companies surveyed reported an incident that required disaster recovery. Of those reporting an incident, 42.5% suffered more than one.
Here are the top 7 causes of business disasters requiring recovery and how they stack up:
- Hardware failure / Server issues: 50%
- Environmental disasters: 29%
- Building accessibility or power disruption: 28%
- Human error: 18%
- Software failure: 18%
- Ransomware or Other Cyberattacks 17%
- Backup / restore failure: 10.5%
There are a number of ways to protect your organization from downtime. Through working with thousands of organizations, we’ve picked a few favorites:
- Cloud – the redundant nature of cloud services means that moving your core services into the cloud will allow your team to work remotely if there is an issue with access, power or connectivity at the office.
- Backup and Recovery as a Service – even if you don’t move everything offsite, a robust backup and recovery platform can keep you running in the face of something catastrophic – like a server failure, a staff mistake, or a cyber breach. Rather than trying to recover from tape or have your MSP try to restore your service, these platforms can stand up your entire production environment up in the cloud in minutes.
- Unified Communications as a Service – the ability for people to communicate on a corporate platform from mobile devices or remote locations is pivotal to a seamless customer experience in the face of adversity.
- Desktop as a Service – empowering employees to work in their familiar desktop environment from anywhere in the world does a lot to keep things moving forward without disruption to business – no matter where they end up working.
We would love to get all of our clients to a place where they may not laugh in the face of a severe disruption, but they at least know they will endure, recover, and move forward with minimal impact to their teams and their customers.
Stay dry out there and let us know how we can help! Even if you haven’t implemented the above strategies, there is a lot that can be done to recover if you know who to call.
