Plan Ahead to Protect Your Business From Disaster
Physical disasters don’t always play on our minds when setting up and managing a business, there’s plenty to do, so why worry right now? Well, here in the Midwest, it’s tornado season and every business should have a plan for dealing with this natural disaster. Other dangers need to be considered as well, especially if you are on the coasts, like fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and freak accidents. It might not even be a physical disaster to fell your business, digital theft can make a huge impact on your business and it’s is attracting more hackers.
Protect Your Information
Studies have shown that one in four small businesses will experience some form of disaster that interrupts their usual business, the median cost of downtime being over $12,500 per day.
Less than half the small businesses surveyed backed up their data on a weekly basis. Protect your information by using comprehensive security and backup solutions to protect everything whether it’s physical, virtual, or mobile. Taking updated external hard drives home at night, backing up to the cloud, or Google Drive can be a great help to keep your “away” from the office when they aren’t needed and you can recover information easily.
Start Planning Now
If your business doesn’t have a disaster preparedness plan, make one today. 41 percent of small businesses said that it never even occurred to them to have a disaster plan in place and a similar number said that disaster planning wasn’t a priority. 43 percent of companies that have experienced a disaster and had no plan will never reopen and 29 percent of those only remain open for two years. That’s how much your business is at risk.
Test and Review
What good is a strategic plan if it’s only in theory? Test and review your plan at least once a quarter, this way you can adapt it to any company changes.
