Get caught reading your disaster recovery plan this month!

Posted By on May 8th, 2019

Don’t you love this time of year? The blossom is on the trees, the Spring flowers are in full bloom, the days are getting longer and the sun even makes an appearance from time to time. The weather is warming up and it’s possible to spend time outside again, a chance to shake off any lingering winter blues. Maybe that’s why May has been nominated “Get Caught Reading Month”? Perhaps it’s to encourage us to spend time sitting outside reading?

While it’s tempting to grab a magazine or a novel, perhaps your time would be better spent reading your disaster recovery plan? As a small business owner, it’s important that you have a plan on how you’d get your business back up and running if it suffered some kind of disaster. Have you thought about what your priorities would be if your premises caught fire or were flooded? And what if you were the victim of a cyber-attack? Without a disaster recovery plan in place, would you have a clear idea of what you need to do?

Shockingly, statistics suggest that up to 80% of businesses which suffer some kind of disaster never recover. However, those that have a robust disaster recovery plan in place have a much better chance of surviving. This is because they have processes in place which enable them to get back up and running faster. And speed is key – the sooner a business can start trading again, the shorter its outage and the lower the shortfall that needs making up in loss of income.

Our advice is simple. If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan already, spend some time creating one. There are lots of templates available online that you can use to help you get started. Your first step should be to undertake a risk assessment, working out what risks your business faces and then thinking about how to mitigate these. Once completed, you should be in a position to create your disaster recovery plan, which you should then test to expose any gaps or shortcomings.

If you do already have a disaster recovery plan that’s great news. But when was the last time you dusted it down and read it? If you wrote your disaster recovery plan over a year ago the chances are that it now needs updating. As your business evolves and grows, so do the risks you face. This in turn means that your disaster recovery plan needs to be adapted to be realigned with your business as it looks now, rather than how it was when the plan was created.

The disaster recovery plan for your business should be reviewed regularly, ideally at least once a year. So how about pulling your disaster recovery plan off the shelf, grabbing a deckchair and sitting in the sun to give it a good read through?