What We Can Learn From the Past: Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery plans are essential for any business as downtime can cost SMEs up to £170,000 per disaster. Software provider V1 recently found that only 17% of businesses have incorporated electronic document storage into disaster recovery plans. Disaster can strike at any time; past events such as The Great Fire of London and the Boxing Day tsunami have taught us that, which is why it is important to ensure that some kind of plan is in place to protect essential documents.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is an area of planning designed to protect a business from the effects of unforeseen events such as flood, fire, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. Such plans try and limit the disruption caused in the wake of a disaster allowing a business to quickly resume crucial everyday functions.
Past Events
There have been many unforeseen events that have happened throughout history which had a huge impact on businesses and communities. These highlight that no matter how much a business prepares, sometimes circumstances are out of its control.
The Great Fire of London was caused by a bakery, but natural disasters are harder to avoid. On average the USA experiences seven hurricanes over a four year period, with three major hurricanes crossing the coast every three years. This highlights the importance of disaster recovery and shows just how important it is for SMEs all over the world. Some countries may not experience hurricanes and extreme weather - however typhoons, thunderstorms, flash flooding and many more disasters affect various parts of the world, increasing the chances of businesses facing some kind of disastrous event at some point.
How to Avoid Disaster
Even if disastrous events are unavoidable in some cases, it doesn’t mean that SMEs shouldn’t take precautions to limit the impact they have. Pearl Scan offers many different document scanning solutions for all businesses, so that no matter the event they can be sure that important documents are safe.
Online cloud storage such as Halogen is also a good idea for businesses looking to implement a disaster recovery plan. This allows employees to upload files to the cloud which can then be accessed from anywhere in the world, on any kind of device. This way if disaster does strike and a company finds themselves out of the office for a while, work can continue as normal in a temporary location. Also, it means if paper documents and records were destroyed, information can still be accessed digitally.