Not so long ago, officials in Washington and leaders of small business advocacy groups warned that the average entrepreneur was far behind the eight ball with respect to disaster recovery and continuity. Their fears and concerns were echoed by the economic damages of major storms and widespread operational outages that took place around 2010, and their assertions appeared to strike a nerve among small business owners in the process.
Coupled with the increasing availability of affordable, effective disaster recovery and continuity solutions now on the market, including cloud computing and virtualization technology, awareness is helping to usher in a new era of resilience in the private sector. However, small business owners need to keep up with the progression of best practices and standards, working to ensure that they maintain relevant, up-to-date policies that cover all possible angles and threats.
Simple steps
Knowledge is the greatest resource an entrepreneur has when it comes to fortifying operations and avoiding disruptions at all costs, and this demands plenty of research both for internal matters and outside factors. Entrepreneur magazine recently listed some of the foundational matters that must be reconciled to ensure strong defense against damaging outages and disruptive problems, affirming that the first step is to understand which threats are pertinent.
Now, business leaders will certainly want to ensure that they are using corporate dollars as efficiently as possible, but when leaning in one direction or another, going a bit overboard will be safer than failing to comprehensively protect the company. According to the news provider, some threats will be obvious, such as severe storms in Florida, but others will not be quite as easy to guess before they actually occur, and those tend to be the most dangerous of all.
However, with the right level of teamwork and planning, companies can make changes to their disaster recovery plans that will help to defend against even the most unlikely threats, and much of this will relate back to communication. The source argued that contingencies and recovery objectives are necessary, and the priority should be keeping all staff members on the same page no matter which collaborative solutions are knocked out by the disaster.
Getting support
Small businesses tend to be the most at risk of experiencing a major disaster for myriad reasons, but the most prominent tend to relate back to fewer IT staff members and less expertise when it comes to building disaster recovery strategies. This is one of the main reasons why the average entrepreneur can often benefit from the use of a managed service provider, especially one that specializes in the needs and requirements of small business owners.
In some instances, this will be a more efficient and financially sound approach than trying to go it alone, as expert guidance can go a long way toward ensuring the highest returns on investments made for disaster recovery and continuity purposes.