Does Your Business Need a Disaster Recovery Plan?

The answer to the question of whether or not you need a disaster recovery plan in short is ‘yes’. Every business, be it a small home business or an enterprise-grade corporation, needs one or multiple disaster recovery plans to be able to face natural and/or manmade disasters without suffering significant setbacks because of the event. In order to be more specific with the reasons as to why your business really does need a disaster recovery plan, let’s go through the following.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

At its core, a disaster recovery plan is a backup and recovery system set in place to counter potential disasters that can destroy your company data or make your business suffer from significant downtime, such as susuccessful hacking attacks with ransom demands, new products and updates, hardware upgrades, natural disasters, etc.

How Does a Disaster Recovery Plan Protect Your Business Against Such Dangers?

UKCloud’s disaster recovery services are DRaaS plans that are designed with special care to ensure that in case of a disaster, or any other situation which may cause downtime or loss of valuable data, their client’s businesses can easily failover from their own data centres to the cloud-based data centres of UKCloud. This ensures continuity without losing significant uptime. In addition to ensuring zero downtime, this also eliminates or at least minimises the chances of losing any valuable data, if and when the situation comes. Given that the two data centres of UKCloud are at more than a 100km’s distance from each other, safety of the backed-up data is assured even in times of extreme catastrophes. 

What If You Do Not Have a Disaster Recovery Plan?

If you do not have the necessary protection and recovery plan in place against the various potential dangers that constantly threaten online businesses and their operations, there is a high chance that in case of an unfortunate disaster, the following effects will occur:

Client Loss – If you have just lost all your client data, it should be obvious that you are going to lose a huge majority of your current clients as they will no longer have any reason to trust your security measures. This will also cause the loss of future clients, as the business’s reputation will be tarnished.

Downsizing – Loss and breach of valuable data, without a way to get it all back is a major setback and it will likely result in a downsizing. What this means is that after struggling so hard to establish and grow your business, you will have to downsize, let go of employees and may even have to shut down in extreme scenarios.

Financial Loss – Data is everything in business and if a hacker team has managed to get hold of your valuable data, and you have no option but to pay them, the financial setback will not be small and even then, there is no guarantee of its safety either. Even if the data is lost through other means than hacking, you will still be losing money because of it. In the best-casescenario, where you don’t lose data but only suffer from a long downtime, the business still just lost a ton of money by being offline and losing sales.

The thing we often forget is that the digital world we live in nowadays may seem perfect at times, but it can also be quite fragile and unpredictable. Therefore, when it comes to sensitive and precious things like valuable and irreplaceable company data, it pays to be extra careful in protecting it with a DRaaSplan for disasters and potentially threatening scenarios.