If you're unprepared, disasters can have catastrophic impacts on your business. Natural disasters, cyberattacks, and service outages can disrupt normal business operations and inflict high costs, including lengthy downtime, expensive repairs, lost productivity, and, in the worst cases, damage your reputation with customers.
National Preparedness Month is an excellent time to create or update your disaster recovery plan. Let’s take a look at top tips your business should consider when preparing for disasters.
Top Tips for Preparing Your Business for Disaster
The more you prepare, the better your business will fare in disaster events. Consider the following tips:
- Update Business Continuity Plans – Develop and update comprehensive business continuity plans. Account for all critical components of your business operations and the needs of your customers, partners, and employees. Ensure you consistently review and update these plans.
- Adopt Alternative Communications Channels – Familiarize yourself with the tools and communications channels your business needs to stay connected to customers during disaster scenarios. Deploy DR-friendly solutions like cloud communications, call forwarding services, and Net Assurance from Cox Business
- IT Disaster Recovery Plans – Task your IT department with creating a disaster recovery plan for all business-critical systems, including servers, computers, devices, software, data, and connectivity. Start with a full systems inventory and continually audit and update these plans over time.
- Train Your Employees – Since the majority of disaster situations result from cyberattacks enabled by human error, you must educate your staff on the latest cybersecurity best practices to ensure secure operations and promote healthy cyber hygiene.
- Analyze Expected Impacts of Natural Disasters – Conduct a thorough Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and risk assessment to evaluate the most critical business systems and ensure they’re resilient to potential threats. Repeat this exercise regularly to confirm your operations are protected.
- Test Your Plans – Test your business continuity and disaster recovery plans to make sure processes and solutions work as intended. You don’t want to uncover fatal flaws in the middle of a disaster.
- Deploy Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) – Outsource data backups and automatic recovery through a managed services provider (MSP). An MSP can offer advanced solutions, expert support, easy scalability, and cost-effective pricing that allow your team to focus on revenue-generating initiatives.
Prepare for Disaster Recovery with Cox Business
Cox Business is the MSP customers trust to get their businesses back up and running during disaster situations. Our disaster recovery solutions are backed by trained experts, 24/7/365 real-time updates, and Cox Business’ robust nationwide network.
