by Natassia Roman, Operations Manager

In wake of last month’s Hurricane Sandy, we are reminded once again that you can never be too prepared. Though in California we do not experience hurricanes, we are at risk of earthquakes, fires and in some areas flooding. After a disaster, much attention is focused on the immediate damage to lives, homes and scarcity of daily essentials.  What’s often overlooked in those first few days or weeks is the effects to local businesses and their employees.  Without business continuity and disaster recovery planning, business owners are tasked to make decisions they are not necessarily prepared to do.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “More than 40% of businesses never reopen following a disaster”.  In business, a disaster is not limited to only natural disasters but also nontraditional disasters such as hardware failures, security compromises or a vendor outage. It is anything that impacts your business systems and processes by decreasing efficiencies.  By going through a business continuity assessment and developing a disaster recovery plan for your business, you are taking a critical step to ensure the livelihood of your business.

Business continuity planning is the assessment of your business before the disaster occurs and a disaster recovery plan is what you would actually enact in the event of a disaster. Steps need to be taken prior to a disaster to protect your critical business systems. Examples include remote backup, redundancy and replication of data that will allow your business to utilize a failover site. With Hurricane Sandy, Amazon and many other companies were impacted by weather hitting northern New Jersey, a region heavily concentrated with data centers. Fortunately, with multiple geographical data center sites, these companies could utilize their disaster recovery plans and reroute operations.   Though your business may not be on the same scale as Amazon, you can easily take advantage of these same backup measures. Have you asked your IT company where their multiple geographical disaster recovery sites are?

Each business continuity assessment and disaster recovery plan is customized to your business size, needs and processes, allowing for scalability and flexibility. Investing the time now will save you time and money should a disaster occur and more importantly with your business operational you will be able to take care of your family, your home, assist your employees and help rebuild your community.

If you have any additional questions or for more information, please give us a call at (951) 813-2672.

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