Unpredictability is a fact of life. Regardless of the type and size of the industry, every company is at the risk of facing a disaster, which could be either natural, technological, or man-made. According to the annual report of State of Global Disaster Recovery Preparedness, three out of four companies fail in terms of disaster readiness. Another statistics, provided by SingleHop, reveals that 43% of businesses that experience a disaster never reopen and only 6% of businesses that don’t have a disaster recovery plan survive in the long term.
In any given year, 20% of businesses experience some type of disaster, and 80% of them go out of business within the next three years. Let’s look at the main reasons why disaster recovery plan is crucial for the survival of every business.
- Downtime and data loss are extremely costly. As per the 2015 disaster recovery statistics, on average a downtime lasts about 18.5 hours, while the cost of each downtime hour can be as much as $8,000 for small companies, $74,000 for mid-size organizations, and $700,000 for large enterprises.
- Dissatisfied customers/clients may never return. Customers demand excellence and expect to have 24/7/365 access to their acquired services. In today’s highly competitive market, companies cannot risk giving their customers any reason to leave, especially avoidable ones such as disconnection of services.
- Lost reputation is hard to regain. Companies cannot temp fate with their brands. Once a company’s reputation is gone, customers will lose their trust in the brand and the business will lose its revenues. In fact, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. However, re-acquiring an old customer who has lost confidence in the brand is much more expensive, if not impossible.
- Mother Nature is unpredictable. According to a publication by The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, disasters have caused $66.5 billion of economic damages in the year 2015 alone. Virtually anywhere around the globe, companies are subject to some sort of failure. Thus, the well-being of businesses cannot be left to chance.
- Machines and hardware do fail. No one can provide 100% guarantee that there will never be any malfunctions or breaks even with the best equipment on the market. Hardware failure is experienced by 99% of IT professionals.
- Compliance with regulations is a requirement. 65% of companies are required to provide Disaster Recovery(DR) Report by HIPAA regulations. Disaster recovery plans help companies to secure data by record keeping and conducting business impact analysis.
- Data loss can happen for different reasons;
*Human error – accidental or unknowing data deletion, modification, overwrite
*File corruption – software error, virus infection
*Hardware – drive failure, controller failure, CPU failure
*Site-related – theft, fire, flood, earthquake, lightning, etc.
- Humans make mistakes. Studies reveal that 80% of unplanned failures are because of ill-planned changes made by administrators, and 60% of availability and performance errors are the result of misconfiguration.
- Disaster recovery plan is an investment for company’s long-term stability. Having the right team, running duplicate sites and multiple servers to ensure there is a backup plan can be costly. Today, disaster recovery as-a-service providers, such as M-Theory Group, provide IT solutions including Disaster Recovery that are affordable, reliable, secure, and flexible.
Finally, in an era where data is king, the idea that at anytime it can be lost is enough motivation for businesses to have a disaster recovery plan. As per Gartner, the market for business continuity and disaster recovery solutions is projected to reach $61.7 billion by 2017.
If you don’t have a disaster recovery strategy yet, you don’t have to be among the thousands of businesses that close and never reopen again. Let us help you save your business. Call us now at (213) 785-8058 to get free environmental analysis and a proposal for a mix of flexible tools that can help you achieve your recovery targets.
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