Who is helping you strategize your business continuity plan? That is right, who is helping you strategize when it comes to prepare for a natural disaster, serious equipment failure, fire, flood or any other disaster, man-made or natural that may hit your business?

In October 2012, Super Storm Sandy struck at the heart of the US economy, seriously impacting small business and bringing the entire city to a grinding halt. Small businesses across New York City and New Jersey were seriously impacted and some wiped out completely.

What lessons can we learn from Super Storm Sandy?

Businesses that had a business continuity and disaster recovery plan and were able to execute their planned strategy had minimal disruption to their business. Once the storm passed, they were able to be back up and running rapidly, either virtually in the cloud or on their original equipment.

Planning is the secret to success. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Business owners who worked with a business continuity expert and had the right disaster recovery solution in place were able to weather the events in New York City.

Hurricanes are not the only type of disaster that can strike your business. Most disasters are a result of equipment failure or other technical failure. Failed hard drives, power surges and other server malfunctions can seriously harm productivity, make you miss important deadlines and cause undue stress on all employees.

We recently worked with a trucking company who experienced data corruption with their Microsoft SQL server and truck tracking application. The trucking company failed to have a disaster recovery solution in place and the last good backup was over a week old. This unforeseen data loss cost the trucking company over $40,000 in added expense to deal with the recovery, new server hardware and overtime costs for the additional labour to re-enter the lost information.

The cost of the disaster recovery solution was only $5,000 with an average monthly investment in secure offsite storage is approximately $500 – $750 per month.

How much are you willing to invest to protect your vital and crucial business information or what are you willing to risk? The choice is yours.

If you are looking for a trusted advisor to help you with your business continuity planning and disaster recovery service implementation, give our team a call.