In the arena of Disaster Recovery, prevention is key for a business of any size. A well designed, implemented, and tested disaster recovery plan is the difference between your business recovering smoothly and as fast as possible, with minimal downtime, and significantly prolonged disruptions to your overall business operations.
Business size is not a good indicator of whether a company is likely to experience disruptions with ransomware attacks being a particular bugbear, which can target any company as long as they use IT based systems.
74 countries across Europe and Asia were subject to a huge ransomware attack in 2017 causing disruptions on a previously inconceivable scale, affecting firms like the US-based Fedex and Russia’s Sberbank. In the UK, NHS computer systems experienced disruptions for several days and the consequences were extremely challenging to manage. Patients were asked not to attend A&E if possible, and to call the 111 or 999 services instead; appointments were cancelled, and some departments were shut down entirely as staff reverted to pen and paper, finding themselves without access to any digital files. Even though the ransomware used, Wanna Decryptor, was relatively well known, a new strain of it succeed in taking down several global systems for a significant amount of time. This attack served as a distressing reminder to businesses that they too could be subject to such (or similar) attack and thus need to have a recovery plan in place.
So, what is a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan?
A Disaster Recovery plan is particularly focused on restoring IT operations and systems, as effectively as possible, post disruptions. The main aim of a DR plan is to minimise overall business downtime, ensuring that your technology operations are back up and running in the shortest time possible.
How can a disaster recovery plan save your business?
A DR plan has many tangible benefits with disaster preparedness being an obvious one. Additionally, the process of putting the plan together will reveal your business’s strengths and weaknesses through risk evaluation and its current potential for recovery (which you may be surprised to learn is limited!). It can help you save money and time by strategically mapping out potential costs of outages and recovery processes, allowing for a budget that incorporates the expense. By carefully charting recovery, your business will be able to mitigate and restore business operations fast at a critical time. If, however, all this has been overwhelming or beyond the expertise of your current workforce then consider Sungard AS’s Disaster Recovery as a Service system, which provides fully managed and holistic approach to business resiliency.
Getting caught out without a disaster recovery plan would be devastating for most businesses. Safeguard your business from potential disaster and attacks with the best DR practices to avoid incurring huge potential costs and compromising the integrity of your business offerings.
