​If Disaster Strikes Your Business, Can You Recover?

It’s the nightmare scenario for many businesses. One moment, everything runs smoothly without any issues. Then, after what seems like a blink of an eye, it’s all compromised. You’ve been hit by a particularly nasty ransomware attack that has encrypted all of your data.

Your operations and productivity are completely brought to a halt.

You run around like a headless chicken – you don’t know what to, nor where to start in fixing the problem.

Time passes by and the length of the downtime continues to stack up higher and higher.

In these dire situations, you can’t afford to panic and lose sight of what’s important. Yes, it’s critical to find out exactly what brought you down in the first place. After all, you’ll want to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

However, the most important thing is to recover your operations as quickly as you can.

ITIC’s latest survey data finds that 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. For your business, that equates to a catastrophic amount of financial damage in only a few hours.

If the downtime is left unanswered, that could even result in the permanent shutdown of your company.

Your First Steps

Naturally, you’ll want to avoid this nightmare scenario if possible. While you can’t always avoid the downtime itself, you can certainly avoid confusion and distraction when recovering. To do that, you’ll need a disaster recovery plan.

A disaster recovery plan helps you keep your team organized and your recovery efforts concentrated. It typically consists of a detailed, step-by-step guide that breaks down every aspect of recovery into a clear and concise instruction.

Think of it as your all-inclusive guide to getting your company back up and running.

For example, the first step of a disaster recovery plan can be to establish a list of the key members of a business. That list must include the people that are most important for recovering business operations and generally keeping operations afloat.

Another important step should be to run a network assessment. Running a network assessment prior to any disaster is beneficial because it lists exactly where the highest areas of network traffic dependencies lie.

In other words, it tells you what applications and devices your employees rely on the most. From there, you can use that information to build a prioritization plan. When disaster strikes, you’ll have a good idea of what to fix first to get your operations back on track in a timely manner.

Disaster Recovery Planning – Plan Ahead of Time

Let’s revisit the same scenario as earlier, but with a disaster recovery plan in place. Once again, you’re chugging along without issues and… disaster strikes. You’ve been struck by ransomware.

However, like a chicken with its head firmly attached to its body, you calmly consult your disaster recovery plan. You gather your most important company resources and get to work restoring your organization’s data from your secure, encrypted backups.

Within a matter of minutes, your company is back up and running. Thanks to your proactive efforts, you’ve managed to avoid the dangerous downtime completely and you bypassed having to pay a cybercriminal their ransom.

Your disaster recovery plan has paid off in spades. But exactly how much have you saved in costs and damages?

 

Read part 2 of our disaster recovery blog series