Article provided by, Charlie Reese owner of CMIT
CMIT Solutions of South Brevard is the small business IT support and IT services company for Melbourne,Rockledge, Palm Bay, West Melbourne, Viera, Eau Gallie, Barefoot Bay, Grant, and Interchange Square.
Depending on what part of the country you live in, natural disasters can mean vastly different things. But one thing ties them all together: each can bring a small to medium-sized business to its knees:
- According to a 2013 Aberdeen Group report, 70% of companies that suffer from natural disasters go out of business within a year — and only 6% survive long-term.
Yet there’s far more to the story than just preparing for weather-related catastrophes:
- Natural disasters make up just 5% of the disaster events that knock small to medium-sized businesses out of commission.
The real culprits, according to a 2013 report by Quorum, are more obvious but less acknowledged:
- 55% of disaster-related downtime stems from hardware failure,
- 22% is the result of human error, and
- 18% occurs because of software failure
No matter their cause, disasters can take a serious toll on a small to medium-sized business:
- According to Aberdeen, the average cost of SMB downtime due to a disaster is $8,581 per hour
- The surveyed companies also reported that businesses suffer from an annual average of 1.49 days of downtime per disasters and an annual average of 2.26 disasters
- Most disasters take up to 5.18 hours to fully recover from
So what can you do to prepare your company for the inevitability of a weather, hardware, software, or human-related disaster? Here are a few things you should know:
- When it comes to data backups, look for providers that offer the 3-2-1 industry standard. That stands for 3 copies of your data stored in 2 off-site locations, backed up a minimum of 1 time per day. Eventually, as backup technology evolves and cloud services are embraced more and more, we may even get to the ambitious 3-4-5 level: 3 copies of your data stored in 4 off-site locations, backed up at 5-minute intervals.
- Make sure business continuity and virtualization plans are regularly tested and ready to implement. Once your remote, redundant backup needs are being met, turn your attention to business continuity and virtualization plans, which will keep your business running in the face of a serious disaster. Are your technology inventories, license keys, and vendor contact lists easily accessible? Is your plan of action tested and outlined in case emergency strikes? You certainly don’t want to left in a lurch after a disaster— and without a well-planned strategy, your business could sufferable immeasurably from even a few days off-line.
- Inquire about proactive monitoring and management. Of course, all the disaster preparedness in the world can still fall short — especially when we’re talking about human error, hardware failure, or software failure taking your systems down for an hour here and an hour there. With a proactive monitoring and management solution many technology problems can be nipped in the bud before they affect productivity and efficiency.