For small and medium business owners in flood-prone regions, protecting assets from rising water calls for more than boarding up windows and stacking sandbags - it requires establishing backup processes that enable business continuity in the face of a disaster.
Business continuity (BC) refers to maintaining business functions or quickly resuming them in the event of a major disruption, whether caused by a fire, flood, epidemic illness or a malicious attack across the Internet. A BC plan outlines procedures and instructions an organization must follow in the face of such disasters; it covers business processes, assets, human resources, business partners and more. A Business Continuity plan should include the ability to restore operations in another location if necessary.
Setting up a secondary data location is not an option for many small or medium-sized businesses, such as those in the present flood-ravaged areas of North and South Carolina. That’s because, unlike larger enterprises, SMBs often lack the capital and human resources required to first build and then maintain redundant facilities.
Instead, small and medium business owners can turn to cloud-based service offerings to ensure the integrity and availability of data and applications in the wake of a flood.
By delivering failover to the cloud within a predetermined time frame, disaster recovery using cloud based services provides the peace of mind small and medium business owners need.
Such disaster recovery solutions enable employees to access email, web servers and critical applications via the internet, from wherever they are. And many service providers follow a pay-as-you-go model, meaning organizations are charged only for the resources they consume.
Despite the importance — and growing ease — of deploying disaster recovery solutions using cloud based services, some small businesses owners do not prioritize disaster recovery and business continuity planning. After all, considering the demands of the day, future worries seem far away. But is a disaster really so distant? What we have seen with the recent hurricane should answer that.
“Research has shown that due to climate warming increasing the intensity of rain events and sea-level rises, flood events of various severity will become more common,” says Mark Hoekzema, chief meteorologist and director of meteorological operations at Earth Networks/WeatherBug. “This could mean more numerous minor floods as well as increasing the potential for a record flood event.”
The recent floods demonstrate just how devastating historic flooding can be.
What we can do is minimize the risk and build resilience.
Contact us at (561)969-1616 or via email at [email protected] for more information on business continuity planning and disaster recovery.