Can You Afford to Not Have a Business Continuity Plan?

It’s hard to justify spending money on a business continuity plan. Your business receives no immediate benefits from it, and you may not even notice that it’s implemented. So why would your company allocate any of its precious resources to set up a plan for recovery?

Because when the time comes to use it, your organization’s survival will depend on it.

As grim as it may sound, it’s true. Your business operations can be interrupted for numerous reasons, such as cyber attacks, hardware failure, and disasters.

Regardless of the specific reason for downtime, the damages to your businesses remain the same. There are three key costs that can cripple your business if you aren’t prepared with a recovery plan.

These include:

The Cost of Recovery

In the event of a disaster, you may very well lose all of your data. And unlike the data of an individual user, corporate data can span tens, hundreds, and even thousands of terabytes. The cost to recover all that data can be exorbitant, running an average of $1 per gigabyte. In other words, that’s $10,000 for 10 terabytes of data.

This also assumes that all of your data is fully recoverable, and doesn’t take into account the large amount of time it takes to recover it. With a business continuity plan, you could rapidly restore all of your lost data and continue with your business operations.

The Cost of Downtime

When it comes to downtime, time is money. And with downtime costing businesses a whopping $8,600 an hour, most businesses can’t afford to stay down for too long. Since downtime lasts an average of 8 hours, you can expect your company to lose around $70,000 from a single downtime event.

Leveraging a proper disaster recovery plan means your organization can be back up and running with minimal downtime. This avoids having to suffer the costly consequences of being unable to work at all and will keep your business more productive.

The Cost of Reputational Damage

The damage that stems from downtime isn’t simply monetary. Businesses that experience downtime can expect reputational damage to also manifest itself. Those that don’t have business continuity plans are seen as unprofessional, unprepared, and unreliable. Plus, competitors will use your downtime to dissuade potential clients from ever using your services.

Conversely, having a structured business continuity plan reflects that your organization’s trustworthiness, preparation, and professionalism.

Plan Ahead with Visual Edge IT

The costs of not having a business continuity plan are clear. Recovery costs are generally unfeasible, downtime costs are staggering, and reputational damage is deeply crippling. On the other hand, preparing for the worst case scenario will easily pay for itself.

Partnering with Visual Edge IT will give your business the plan it needs to spring back quickly. We take the time to get to know your business, and where the most critical functions lie. From there, we’ll work with you to create a plan that will detail the steps for recovering your data, starting with the most important data and working outwards.

If you’re ready to prepare for the future, contact us today to get started.