Tech-based emergencies cost American businesses billions of dollars each year. However, with a bit of pre-planning, you can implement a disaster recovery plan that gets you back up and running quickly and with as few interruptions as possible.
What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A disaster recovery plan is simply a list of steps a business has taken to preemptively get ahead of issues that might cause financial loss, data loss, damage to their reputation, and operational disruptions.
How Do I Create an IT Emergency Plan?
There is no one-size-fits-all way to ensure that your business doesn’t take a hit when your systems do. But there are a few general steps that you can take to create a plan that works for your business.
First, conduct a thorough risk assessment. Work with your IT team or managed services provider to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities to your systems. This means assessing everything from cyber-attacks and hardware failures to human error and downtime that might be caused by power outages or natural disasters. Next, you’ll need to identify your critical assets. This might be applications, hardware, or physical storage units that contain essential business function information or personally identifiable information.
Once you know your vulnerabilities, work with your management team to create an incident response team that will execute your emergency tactics when necessary. You should involve not only IT and management but also decision-makers and crew leaders from each department. Clearly outline the roles and responsibilities for each of your incidence response team members.
Ultimately, your goals are resilience, recovery, and contingencies. This means that your plan must be able to help you recover and bounce back from issues while creating redundancies that reduce data and system losses.
ITC Can Help
Whether you run a small business or a large corporation, you can benefit from the experience and expertise of ITC. Our experts in cybersecurity, managed IT, and commercial cloud solutions can help you build and implement a business continuity and disaster recovery plan that’s tailored to your business, customers, and needs. Keeping your business moving with minimal losses can help you return to normal without sacrificing your finances or reputation.
Contact ITC today for more information on how creating a disaster recovery plan can help keep your business going strong in the midst of an IT catastrophe.
