If your business is struck by a disaster, such as a flood or fire at your premises, or a cyber-attack which means your systems are affected, it is inevitable that your business will experience a period of downtime potentially leaving you unable to trade.

How long this period of downtime will last is hard to determine. If you are a retail business and a fire destroys or damages your business premises, then you can expect to cease trading for an extended period of time. If your IT systems fail, recovery may be quicker, but business impact could be just as significant – especially if you suffer a data breach or similar which could see your customers impacted and your businesses reputation damaged.

In fact, research shows that 80% of businesses do not recover back to their pre disaster status after suffering the effects of an unexpected disaster event. And small businesses may be particularly vulnerable to this given the impact a period of downtime can have on limited resources – such as finances, customer base and employees.

Speed of recovery and getting your business back up and running is therefore key. The best way to prepare for this and reduce the time it takes to react to the effects of a disaster is to plan ahead. Those businesses with a robust disaster recovery plan and set of processes in place will fair better than those who haven’t given any thought to how a disaster could impact their business and the steps to take if the worst should happen.

There are a number of reasons why planning is beneficial:

• Responsibility is allocated – key staff will be given roles and know what they need to do in the event of disaster to quickly get their business function operating again
• Giving communication a focus – knowing the key stakeholders that you need to inform about a disaster means you can ensure any communication is handled proactively. This could include ensuring the safety of your employees or notifying your customers so that they don’t take their business elsewhere
• Objectives – it gives you the opportunity to create realistic objectives with regards to timeframes for getting your business functions back up and running before your business will start to suffer. You then know the limitations and parameters you are working to
• Tested response – by creating a plan it gives you the opportunity to practice your disaster response strategy. This means responding to a real-life disaster hopefully won’t be such a shock and result in panic or delay

To aid your recovery further, it is also possible to employ the services of a disaster recovery specialist such as First Recovery. In the event of a disaster we will aim to get you back up and running in a recovery centre as quickly as possible and within 24 hours. We understand that speed of response to a disaster is key to your long term business success so if you have any questions or would like to understand more about how we could help your business don’t hesitate to get in touch.