Don’t panic! You’ve got it covered (we hope)

Posted By on March 9th, 2019

9 March is National Panic Day, raising awareness of what happens when you experience a panic attack. Symptoms are often mistaken for a heart attack and include: shortness of breath, sweating, nausea, dizziness, trembling, feeling hot or cold, choking, numbness or tingling, a racing heart or heart palpitations, chest pain, fear of dying, fear of losing your mind, and feeling detached from yourself.

A major cause of panic attacks is stress. This can be brought on by any number of factors. Extreme emotional events, such as the death of a loved one, can be a trigger. It can also build up over time and a series of small events or factors such as email overload can lead to a feeling of being out of control and overwhelmed. Physical events that have a direct impact on your wellbeing or financial stability can also lead to panic attacks, especially if they leave you feeling out of control.

Consider this scenario. You run your own business and arrive at your business premises one morning to discover that a fire broke out in a neighbouring building overnight, causing significant damage to their unit and sufficient damage to your own to render it unusable. A million thoughts run through your head: your employees will be arriving at work shortly; you have deadlines to meet; important customer and supplier meetings scheduled at your offices over the next few days. What should you do first? You feel overwhelmed and start to panic. You’re short of breath, your heart is pounding and your arms are tingling. You think you’re having a heart attack.

Now consider this alternative scenario. You run a business and arrive at your premises one morning to find that there was a fire overnight, devastating your neighbour’s property and damaging yours. You quickly realise that you won’t be able to use your offices for a while and will need to find an alternative base from which to run operations. You have deadlines to meet, important orders to fulfil and meetings in the diary that still need to take place. It’s imperative that business continues as usual with as little disruption as possible. You know this is key to business success.

Fortunately, you have a tried and tested disaster recovery plan in place. You make a few phone calls, one of which is to your specialist disaster recovery supplier, First Recovery. They deploy a specialist Disaster Event Manager who arrives on site later that day and helps to co-ordinate the reinstatement of crucial business functions. By the following day, you and key members of your team are settled in temporary offices just down the road and all your IT and business systems are back up and running. Within 24 hours, it’s business as usual.

Isn’t the second scenario the preferable one? If you want to avoid a panic attack (or worse) can we suggest you start working on your disaster recovery plan without delay? And a call to First Recovery wouldn’t go amiss – after all, if disaster were to strike your business, they could mean the difference between business success and business failure.