Don’t Make These 3 Disastrous Mistakes
You read the news. So you know that disaster – natural or manmade – could strike at
any time.
You know every responsible business, healthcare enterprise and other organization needs
a disaster recovery (DR) plan and measures in place.
But often the DR measures an enterprise has in place aren’t enough to truly protect:
- data and network integrity
- operations
- cash flow
- compliance
- customer trust
(Not to mention your job if something goes wrong).
This critical and sometimes disastrous gap can often be traced back to one of these three major DR mistakes.
Disaster Recovery Mistake #1:
Putting it off.
There’s a classic but still relevant piece of productivity advice: Make sure you make time for tasks that are important but not urgent.
That is, carve out time for things that may not be immediately pressing but are critical for long-term personal or business health, like exercise or strategic planning.
DR is in the same category; it is vital, yet all too often it gets pushed back in favor of dealing with the crisis du jour. Until a regulatory problem, data loss incident, or full-on disaster forces the issue – at a painfully high price.
Disaster Recovery Mistake #2:
Neglecting business continuity planning (BCP).
As you know, disaster recovery is not a synonym for “backup.”
While backups are, of course, a vital element of DR, there’s a lot more to DR than that. What would your enterprise do if your primary facility were suddenly incapacitated for nine hours? How about three weeks?
Would you still be able to maintain your service level agreements (SLA), serve your customers, keep cash flow coming in and maintain vital operational processes?
Neglecting BCP may also be holding your business back from larger opportunities. For a technology company, for example, robust DR/BCP and 100% SLA are a basic requirement for doing business with many major companies and government agencies.
One Involta customer engaged us for a custom DR/BCP solution that enabled them to land Fortune 500 clients (and seamlessly maintain 100% SLA through a surprise crisis).
Read more
Disaster Recovery Mistake #3:
Choosing a DR/BCP or colocation partner based primarily on price.
While cost is an important consideration for choosing a DR/BCP or colocation partner, it is only one of multiple critical factors that should be examined.
Why shouldn’t cost be the primary consideration?
A single successful cyberattack on a large company via IT infrastructure costs an average of $1.98 million. And that doesn’t include the long-term financial impact of reputation damage. Read more
With IT now intimately connected with every aspect of modern business, and natural disasters and cyberattacks both on the rise, the financial stakes of IT infrastructure to your business could not be higher.
Choose your partners carefully.
Free Guide to Disaster Recovery Partner Selection
We’ve put together a comprehensive guide of factors to examine and questions to ask when selecting a DR partner, along with some notes on why we think these factors are important.
We suggest you use this guide to evaluate potential partners to ensure your enterprise
makes the decision with thorough information.
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