This story repeats itself in some manner over and over probably hundreds of times every day.  Some reports say that up to 70% of small to mid-size businesses will experience a significant downtime situation in the next 12 months. According to a study done by Acronis, network downtime will cost 80% of small to medium-sized businesses about $20,000 per hour. For 20% of businesses, it could cost at least $100,000.

Downtime can range from a few hours to a few weeks.  No matter how long your computers are down it’s painful.  Your customers suffer, your employees suffer and your bottom line suffers. One week of downtime for a business that relies on their computer system can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

We all know what can cause computer downtime, natural disasters like the recent floods in Texas or the tornados in the Mid-West. Then there are other less public but just as devastating issues like the Crypto locker virus, internet hackers, failed hardware and user errors.

In today’s robust and highly competitive business climate just backing up your file data does not protect your business against prolonged downtime sufficiently.  Professional organizations such as medical practices, law firms and CPA’s must not only guarantee that their data is available, but it must also be secure and in many cases encrypted as well.

Basic tape, hard drive, and flash drive backup solutions do not and can not protect your systems any longer.  You need a business continuity plan so that you do not become part of the 70% we alluded to earlier.

Steps for a Business Continuity Audit

  1. The best thing to do right away is have a trusted and qualified IT firm provide you with a business continuity audit.
  2. Next establish what your RTO (response time objective) and RPO (response point objective) objectives are.
  3. Then review what the ROI would be to meet those objectives with a proper intelligent business continuity plan. The plan should include both a way to secure and retrieve your system quickly on-premise as well as in the cloud.  By doing this, you assure yourself that no matter what the cause is that takes your system down you can be back up and operating as quickly as needed.

It’s not a question of will you experience a significant downtime occurrence. The question is when and will you be prepared to meet the challenge.