Disasters of All Kinds Can Jeopardize Your Business and Livelihood

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning Is Essential For All Businesses Today.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning can save your business from downtimes or even a complete closure due to disruptive and disastrous events such as hurricanes, tornados, floods, plant explosions, terrorist attacks, computer viruses or power outages. In the case below, a train explosion destroyed businesses and forced them to shut down.

Residents and Business People Flee As Train Explodes in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec

An expansive section of a town in Quebec was demolished on July 6^th when a 73-car train carrying crude oil derailed causing explosions that sent flames shooting sky high. Nearly 1,000 people were forced from homes and businesses in Lac-Mégantic to escape the blaze and toxic fumes.

Lac-Mégantic resident Claude Bedard described the scene of the explosions as “dreadful.” “It’s terrible,” Bedard said. “We’ve never seen anything like it. The Metro Store, Dollarama, everything that was there is gone.”

Ensure Your Business is Protected and Your Business Operations Can Continue

When a disaster like this occurs it can disrupt the lives of residents and business owners for extended periods of time, from weeks to even months.  In this incident, entire businesses went up in flames. If they didn’t have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans in place, their businesses will likely shut down forever.

Most businesses today rely on information technology (IT) to operate. Because of this, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning are critical elements of business management. However, the reality is that many companies procrastinate, and when a disaster occurs one or more critical systems break down resulting in a significant loss of data, customers and revenue.

What Are Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans?

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is the preparation and testing of procedures to protect your IT business operations.  Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) provides the means for recovering IT data in the event of a loss, damage or failure of your IT system. Together they ensure your business can operate in the event of power outages, computer viruses, cybercrime or property damage; this way you can continue to provide service to your clients and customers. A business continuity plan with disaster recovery must be developed and implemented prior to a disaster.

No Matter How Small Your Business, You Need an IT Managed Service Provider

To Ensure Your IT Infrastructure is Always Protected.

Contact a reliable business continuity and disaster recovery team likes ours. Our business continuity specialists will develop and implement Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans for your business to ensure your critical IT data is securely backed up in a safe, offsite location, and that you can access it 24/7 from anywhere.

Our business continuity experts will begin by interviewing you to assess your IT needs. They may ask you to consider the potential risks to your business if your IT system shuts down for an extended period of time; and how long you believe your business operations could continue without access to your IT system.  For some companies, just a few hours could cause major disruptions, for others, a few days could pass before they’re affected.  Our team needs to know this to ensure you can continue operating while your old data center is being repaired and data is being restored.

Our experts will suggest that you establish an alternate location where you can set up computer systems in the instance that your business property is damaged and you have to flee (as in the instance of the train derailment). This should be determined before data from a backup can be restored.

Keep in mind that servers can’t be purchased off a shelf from your local retail store, and it’s impractical to recover all of your computer applications in a short period of time. Our business continuity experts will take care of this for you in advance so you’re ensured of having the server access and applications you need.

Re-establishing an email service is a top priority because most businesses can’t function without it.  Our business continuity specialists will address this and ensure your business communications can continue from anywhere at any time.  Our business continuity team will also ensure that your website is always up and running, and that you can access it for updates.

Finally, we will ensure your existing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans are up to date (if you have one).  We will also conduct regular testing and monitoring to ensure your plans are continually viable and dependable.

Don’t Risk Jeopardizing Your Business and Livelihood

With luck your business will never be affected by a disaster, but you can’t count on this or risk jeopardizing your livelihood.  With professionally planned and implemented business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, your business IT systems will continue to operate no matter the disaster.