What is disaster recovery and why is it so important?

Our society and the way we now do business is centered around technology. According to the official website of the Department of Homeland Security, practically every aspect of a business is reliant upon technology infrastructure and systems. 

“Businesses use information technology too quickly and effectively process information. Employees use electronic mail and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephone systems to communicate. Electronic data interchange (EDI) is used to transmit data including orders and payments from one company to another. Servers process information and store large amounts of data. Desktop computers, laptops and wireless devices are used by employees to create, process, manage and communicate information.”

— department of homeland security

Disasters have therefore spiked in their severity, due to the necessity of technology in the modern business setting. 

These disasters can come in many shapes and forms. The two main categories are natural (water damage, fire damage, earthquakes, hardware failure, etc.) and manmade (cyber-attacks, human error, etc.).

To put into perspective the dangers of such disasters, in a previous blog, we covered how an estimated 60% of small to medium-sized businesses will go out of business several months after a cyber-attack. 

It is of the utmost importance that companies prepare for disasters through both a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan. With the disaster recovery plan specifically linked to the business continuity plan. 

This linkage will allow your business to continue operations in the inevitable event of a disaster. For example, if your network fails, you won’t have to send all of your call center employees home because you have a backup network that will kick in as soon as your primary connection goes down.

All companies should be prepared to face disasters; however, some good news is that you can talk to Conectrix about solutions such as moving to the Cloud or Azure which have much better disaster recovery capabilities than on-premise solutions.