The Risks Of Not Having A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Business

By Frank Harrison

Sometimes known as "business continuity", disaster recovery can be defined as the process of ensuring your business can keep running when faced with a disaster of some kind. These disasters could range from the physical, such as a floor in your offices that affects your servers or it could be virtual or web-based, such as a virus damaging your systems or a hacking attempt deleting your data - it could even lead to you losing all of the data on your customers! As a lot of businesses now rely on their computer systems to simply function this could be very damaging.

If you have implemented a disaster recovery plan you are safe in the knowledge that during an incident like this your business can continue operating. Data being backed up physically and kept in another location is a simple example of a disaster recovery plan. Ignoring such processes leaves you open to:

Productivity Decrease or Loss
A "disaster" doesn't necessarily mean that you will automatically lose your data. But if you aren't able to access it for a while you will still lose productive time that could be earning money for your business. Depending on your business you will likely not be able to provide services for a period, which can be damaging.

Loss of Customer Trust
When a customer finds out you have lost their data, or even worse its fallen into the wrong hands like at the Playstation Network, they lose trust in you. Your reputation is damaged and customers may leave.

Closing Down
Data does show that many companies experiencing data loss actually end up closing down due to the issues highlighted above.


The reasons above show that by implementing an IT disaster recovery plan and IT security you could save your business before an event happens. If you do not have a plan in place it would be advisable to do so before it is too late.

About the Author:

Speak to Keytech who provide data management services including disaster recovery solutions.