Three Things Every Business Needs To Be Disaster-Proof

Featured article by Chris Schwarz, CEO of Cyber Wurx

No one wants to deal with a disaster – but eventually, your business will have to. How prepared you are will determine whether you succeed or fail.

Inclement weather. Catastrophic hardware failure. A devastating cyberattack. A disgruntled employee.

Even the best-run, most successful company can potentially end up crippled if caught unprepared by any of these incidents. Hardware can be damaged or destroyed. Critical data can end up lost or stolen. Ongoing systems can come crashing down, crushing your lines of business.

“Risk is something that is happening everywhere,” explains continuity planner and disaster recovery expert Mark Norton. “No one can really fly by that excuse that disasters don’t happen here. Even if they haven’t happened in the last two to three years, that doesn’t mean that going forward you don’t need to be thinking about these risks and threats.”

By that same vein, if you do take the risks and threats facing your business into account – if you plan adequately for them – you can weather just about any storm. Here’s what you need to ensure your business is disaster-proof.

1. Good Backups

First thing’s first, take full inventory of the data within your organization. What files are absolutely mission-critical? Using an automated backup solution, create copies of those files daily – and make sure those copies are stored off-site, isolated from your systems.

This will ensure both that your files are immediately available in the event of a catastrophe, and that issues such as ransomware or a natural disaster don’t knock your backups offline.

2. Redundant Infrastructure

Do you have extra hardware ready to spin up in the event that something fails? Are you using a cloud-based solution that allows you to immediately failover onto virtualized infrastructure in the event that a system is knocked offline? If you’re operating your own data center, have you ensured you’ve stuff like backup generators with extra fuel?

If your answer to all of the above questions isn’t ‘yes,’ you’ve some work to do.

3. A Plan

Last but certainly not least, you need to have a plan in place for every incident your company could possibly deal with. Where is the muster point if your facility suffers a fire? How are employees expected to respond in the event of an active shooter? How should your IT department document a cyberattack? More importantly, how will you notify your clients that their services will be offline?

In short, here’s what you need to do:

• Conduct regular disaster drills
• Make process documents readily available
• Ensure every employee knows exactly what they should be doing when an incident occurs
• Make it easy for your support teams to stay in touch with clients and customers during an incident – use social media, automatic redirects, etc.

Prepare Yourself

No business is immune to disaster – and sooner or later, it’s likely that you’re going to face one. How successfully you survive depends on how prepared you are. To that end, the more you do beforehand, the less you’ll have to do when a crisis actually strikes.

About Chris – Chris Schwarz is the CEO of Cyber Wurx, a  premium colocation services provider with a world-class Data Center in Atlanta, Georgia that also specializes in Dedicated Server Hosting and VPS Hosting. Check out their hosting blog at https://cyberwurx.com/blog/.