How to Create a Successful Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Small Business
Whether it’s a natural catastrophe, like a flood and hurricane, or a cyber attack, or fire breakout a well-thought-out disaster recovery plan can make all the difference in getting your business back to its feet.
It’s true though – disasters can be merciless when it comes draining the financial resources of small businesses.
Statistically, more than 40% of small businesses never manage to recover from a disaster. Consequently, these businesses that don’t resume operational activities within five days are 93% more likely to fail in a year.
But the fact remains, large firms have the financial capacity to deal with and set up a disaster recovery plan, it’s the small businesses that often suffer the consequences of unexpected disasters.
It’s of utmost significance that small business owners should have a disaster recovery plan in place to avoid any unforeseeable calamity. And to mitigate the effects of such a nightmarish situation, follow this simplified procedure to create a disaster recovery plan for your business.
#1 Set Up the Process for a Disaster Recovery Plan
The planning process begins with knowing exactly who and how to contact in specified order after a disaster. Small businesses can instruct employees to take necessary measures to prevent property, assets, and any inventory damage. Furthermore, you can contact local authorities or a special security team.
And once the disaster recovery plan is in place, you can allocate job responsibilities and conduct training classes for your employees.
#2 Build an Effective Disaster Recovery Strategy
The end-goal of a small business is to resume its operational functions as soon as possible. And the trick to build and implement a successful disaster recovery strategy is to expect a worst-case scenario. Therefore, communicate with the employees in your firm as to why devising a viable strategy for disaster recovery is important.
Figure out the limitations and priorities of your business. To develop a suitable disaster recovery strategy you also have to account for applications, data storage, physical damage to your servers, and manual access to the system network.
For instance, you can carry out business impact analysis (BIA) to better understand the cause-and-effect implications a disaster could have on your business sales.
The BIA even allows you to carry out gap analysis that can help you sort out the differences beforehand as what’s available and what you might need in the hour of crisis.
And you can always seek help from the Small Business Administration (SBA) to borrow more than $2 million to repair and replace damaged inventory in your office.
#3 Make Insurance and Budget Analysis
Small businesses don’t have the luxury for a total sum estimation of their office inventory. Therefore, it would be wise to calculate the replacement cost for each piece of equipment. Now, it may sound time-consuming, but it can help you streamline recovery procedures in a disaster.
The insurance check is more fitted to your business needs once you know the cost structure. For the collection of the check, make sure there are no discrepancies in your insurance coverage to pay for direct and indirect costs.
And get insurance in accordance with the geographical location of your business.
#4 Collect Store Supplies
Assemble all the necessary store supplies that your employees and business might need after a disaster. Provide medical kits to ensure the safety of your employees. Similarly, invest considerably when it comes to backup systems that can resume your business operations to counteract a disaster.
#5 Post-disaster Communication Plan
Collecting relevant information that can be profitable for your business is a long-term commitment. Thus, having a post-disaster communicative strategy is a must for small business owners. The idea is to make sure firms don’t lose vital contact information of the clients, customers, vendors, creditors, agents, and insurance provider.
Use every traditional and tech-savvy digital marketing tactic to continue smooth communications with your major clients and customers.
#6 Align Logistic Goals
The supply chain of your business could be disrupted as suppliers and vendors are also vulnerable to disasters. And this can create even more problems for a small business that functions as a B2B business supplier.
The solution is to combine the logistical goals of your supply chain team with backup options. As a result, the dependency factor is reduced for both parties.
#7 Understand the Importance of Backup
You need to duplicate sensitive documents, such as contracts and records of your business. With the advent of cloud storage and migration, small businesses can store an entire collection of relevant documents with ease.
The documents, however, can also be stored manually in a deposit box to protect them from possible cyber attacks.
Conclusion
Small business owners have to arrange funds, but the need to prepare and invest in a disaster recovery plan should be viewed as a return on investment. It’s a fail-safe mechanism that can save and re-build your business in no time.