No matter how large or small the business, preparing for the unexpected is absolutely critical. You never know when a fire, flood or other emergency will disrupt your day to day operations, and you need to be prepared should the unexpected come calling.
Big businesses have entire infrastructures devoted to just this kind of planning. Corporations regularly update their disaster recovery plans, and they often run drills to make sure their workers are ready should disaster strike.
When it comes to small businesses, however, fielding that kind of response and developing that comprehensive kind of protection can be elusive. Many small business owners put off their disaster recovery plans, hoping that nothing will go wrong and those plans will never be needed. And while that hope and pray approach may work for the short term, it is definitely not a long term strategy.
If you want to protect yourself and your small business, you need a plan, and you need to know the essential elements that make up an effective disaster recovery plan. Here are the pieces you will need to put in place before you can consider your disaster recovery planning complete.
Contact Information for Key Personnel
If you ever need to put your disaster recovery plan in place, you will need a way to reach key members of your team. It is important to have a complete, and completely accurate, telephone tree in place so business owners can reach their management teams and managers can reach out to their employees.
Keep in mind that cell phone networks may be less than reliable in certain disaster situations, so it is important to gather as many landline phone numbers as you can. While not every member of your team will have home phone service, including that information in your telephone trees could prove critical when putting your disaster recovery plan in place.
Contact Information for Clients and Customers
You will obviously need to contact key members of your team, but you will want to reach out to clients and customers as well. Even the most robust disaster recovery plan may not eliminate all downtime, and the people and companies you rely on for your income will need to know what is going on.
Hopefully you already have a database filled with phone numbers, addresses and other customer and client information. If not, now is the time to create one. Like other key documents, you will want to make sure that database is kept up to date, and that a copy is uploaded to your cloud storage account.
An Alternate Site for Essential Business
Disasters take many forms, some virtual some physical. If your small business is the victim of a data breach or ransomware attack, you can probably continue to operate from your normal facilities, but what if the damage is caused not by hackers but by Mother Nature instead?
If the disaster you suffer takes the form of a fire, flood or other natural disaster, you may not be able to operate from your normal offices, and it is important to have an agreement in place to continue your operations from an alternate site.
This alternate site planning can take many forms, from contingent agreements with other business owners to signed leases and other legal documentation. It is important to have this information in place before disaster strikes; when the worst happens it may be too late.
Document Uploads to the Cloud
Hopefully you already have a cloud storage account in place, one you use to keep your backups current and restore lost files on an as needed basis. The establishment of cloud storage and backup is a vital consideration for any small business owner, especially for firms that choose to outsource their IT operations.
Those remotely stored documents will play a key role in any disaster recovery plan, giving you the access you need should the unexpected strike. But you will also want to make sure other key documents, from insurance policies to property deeds, have been uploaded and securely stored in the cloud.
A Plan for Secure Transportation
Having your key documents in the cloud and an accurate telephone tree stored remotely will help enormously in the event of an emergency, but there are still some items that will have to be moved physically. Your disaster recovery plan should include a list of those key items, along with a plan for relocating them securely.
Keep in mind that local transportation networks may be down should a natural disaster strike, so you may need to include some contingency planning in your disaster recovery assessment. Creative thinking is a key element of any successful disaster recovery plan, so build in redundancies to increase the odds of a smooth transition for everyone.
Hopefully your small business will never suffer a disaster. Hopefully your firm will never be devastated by a fire or flood, and hopefully you will never find your company on the wrong side of a cyber attack or ransomware demand. Even so, hopeful thinking will not help you if a disaster does strike, so take the time and make sure your planning includes the essential elements listed above.
