Need a reason to think about business continuity? Zombies. Then again, you probably won’t be seeing World War Z coming to a neighborhood theater near you, but there are plenty of other disasters to think about.
Think about Hurricane Sandy and the damage it caused along the East Coast. Or think about the Oklahoma twister that destroyed an entire community. Or think about smaller disasters, such as a broken water main that swamps your servers? Are you prepared for those scenarios? Even if zombies aren’t pressing in on you, maybe you should take a closer look at your company’s risk exposure and surmise the consequences should a major power outage occur in the wake of a violent storm.
Few people in today’s Google-it-with-a-mouse-click culture realize the potential disaster waiting in the wings should a power failure knock a business offline. Even a few hours of downtime is unthinkable in today’s rapid-paced business environment.
If you manage a small business, consider what you would do if your clients were forced to use a canoe to visit your office. Let’s say you have a full agenda for the next two weeks and business is roaring along at a fast clip. What if, come tomorrow morning, a natural disaster hits a neighborhood near you?
And it needn’t be an earthquake, just an unexpected off-season snowstorm that downs power lines, wreaks havoc on municipal services and floods the streets, overwhelming municipal pumping stations.
Sure, you have insurance, but do you have assurance of business continuity no matter what comes down the pike? Consider what a complete cessation of your professional practice for a week or two would do to your bottom line.
Operating a thriving professional practice or business these days entails both an online presence as well as a reliable backup for your data. Take a moment to picture those idling staff members who would need to wait for three hours for the lights to come back on; they’d eventually give up and go home for the day. That’s money down the drain.
If you operate a bustling business, an outage adds up to one very big ‘ouch’ when it comes to your bottom line. That’s why we always recommend a hybrid system, utilizing both onsite and cloud solutions, or two Internet providers with redundant backups to minimize loss.
Ten years ago, busy professionals had few ways to circumvent the fickleness of severe weather, catastrophic failures in electrical substations or vulnerable gas lines ruptured by earthquakes. Today, migration to the cloud stores your data safely away from the specter of calamity, automatically updating stored work at regular intervals. Don’t wait. Investigate your options before those hoards of zombies come around the next bend. PWR Resources/Rozsa Consulting can help.