5 Downtime & Recovery Statistics For Your Business To Avoid

Is your company prepared for the loss of revenue or profit, and more importantly, lifelong clients?

Articles published April 13, 2017 by Steve Simpson

Do you have a plan in place if your network goes down, your systems fail, or disaster strikes? Even if you have a plan, do you know if it’s effective and if it allows you to recover quickly? Have you tested the plan? How much revenue and profit does downtime cost your organization?

These are essential for you to consider, because all it takes is one mistake, system failure, or unforeseen event to halt your operations. Any amount of downtime can cost you potential profit, and can negatively impact your reputation with current and potential clients. Is your company prepared for the loss of revenue or profit, and more importantly, lifelong clients?

A Forrester market study titled “The State of IT Resiliency and Preparedness” revealed some of the main causes and drivers behind downtime and disaster recovery. Here are some key facts we’ve identified from the report.

What Should be Done?

As a data backup, disaster recovery (IT system recovery), and business continuity solutions provider, we’ve helped many organizations implement plans to prepare for disaster. It’s critical to have recovery and business continuity plans in place. It’s also important to calculate the cost of downtime and determine recovery time objectives.

A key way to enhance business recovery following plan creation is to conduct a tabletop exercise. This exercise will help identify a list of procedures and processes that an organization would follow to ensure everything is executed and implemented correctly. A tabletop exercise can help employees know the exact procedure if an incident occurs, and enables them to follow the plan with more confidence in moments of stress.

In addition to your disaster recovery and business continuity plans, you should develop a solid cybersecurity strategy. We recommend to start by evaluating and documenting everything you’re currently doing to prevent cyberattacks (include technology, training, processes, etc.). According to Trend Micro, 64 percent of organizations need to restructure their security to protect against hackers and cyberattacks. A tabletop exercise depicting a cyberbreach can provide significant benefits, including improved communication and improved time of recovery, should a crisis occur.

To improve business continuity, many organizations are utilizing off-site storage, backup, and application hosting. Leveraging a data center and virtual environment can offer these benefits:

• Data protection if an incident occurs.
• Provides efficient recovery options, should an incident occur to the primary hosting environment.
• Can help reduce recovery time to minutes or hours, instead of days.
• Can help your company avoid losing lifelong clients and damaging their reputation.

It’s never fun to think about “worst-case scenarios” for your organization, however, it is necessary and can ensure you are well prepared for unplanned incidents and downtime.

What areas do you need to focus on to improve business continuity within your organization?

View our guide: The Ultimate Guide to Cyberattacks