Your Comprehensive Strategy to Recover from Any IT Disaster Fast

The Key to Fast Disaster Recovery

Are you prepared for a significant IT disaster? Fast disaster recovery requires experience and the right technology. But ultimately, you need a continuity plan.  

The digital age has brought incredible business efficiency while expanding capabilities beyond what we could achieve by human-power alone. Still, as we continue down this path of digital transformation, it’s vital to understand the risks.

The more we integrate technology, the more profoundly we depend on it.

A Gartner study found that the average cost of downtime across industries is around $300K/hour. That’s roughly $5,600/min. And on top of the direct financial losses, you have the customer experience impact. 32% of customers say they’ve left a “beloved brand” after one awful experience. This percent may feel small, but in the digital world, when a customer leaves, their departure ripples through an organization with negative reviews and social media.

For this reason, we need clearly defined and comprehensive IT disaster recovery strategies.

Build a Proactive Plan

With the costs of downtime so high, you need to create a plan before disaster strikes and practice implementing it to whatever extent possible.

Your plan should include several primary aspects:

• A recovery team of people who can work quickly to restore operations. Your recovery team comprises not only C-suite and departmental experts but also legal counsel that can help you understand any potential ramifications and excellent managed IT services that can help lead your company out of a disaster.
• Prioritization of areas from most critical to least
• Response plans for different kinds of disasters (e.g., natural, cyberattacks, employee sabotage)
• Business continuity plan for critical operations

Having these in place and tested will ensure faster disaster recovery. Having a team of skilled and prepared IT professionals will be the difference between a disaster and a momentary hiccup in operations.

Invest in Business Continuity Solutions

With the costs of downtime so high, the ultimate goal should be no downtime for your critical operations. Modern business continuity solutions help you seamlessly shift among servers and systems so that customer care and other essential activities continue to function.

Some qualities to look for in business continuity solutions include:

• Cloud backups with a track record of no data loss
• Machine learning that helps you quickly identify compromised or missing data, so that it can seamlessly be restored
• Fully scalable to meet business needs

Vendor to vendor cloud migration can be a significant undertaking. Hence, businesses need solutions that will grow and continue to advance and adapt to the latest technology and continuity solutions.

Experienced managed IT professionals help businesses understand how to invest in the right solutions for their company.

Shape Perception

Often missteps in public relations are more damaging than the actual event itself, so be prepared as a business to manage your reputation. Please don’t wait for the press to pick up the story and run with their version of it. The news won’t spread in the morning presses tomorrow morning. Instead, it will be on social media within hours or minutes. Having the right on-site and managed IT team at the helm can ensure you can get ahead of bad press and present a “we’ve got this under control” image.

Yes, you should seek customer, vendor, and shareholder relations counsel to ensure you understand how the steps you take will impact “perception.” Develop a clear, concise, and as transparent as a possible message to communicate with stakeholders.

But what if you don’t know much yet? Often the best approach would be, “this is what we know so far” rather than appearing to hide something.

Your experienced managed IT services will be instrumental in maintaining order and perception during a disaster through constant, professional communication during an emergency. They will ensure that you have the right continuity and disaster recovery solutions in place. They can quickly assess the damage, understand the causes, and know what step to recover fast.

Managed IT Services

Fast disaster recovery requires a definite plan. It’s an investment in both the right technology and the right people. When disaster strikes, you need to know that your managed IT services company is prepared to provide you with the business continuity you need. Learn more about our Managed IT solutions and contact us for a proposal.