How a Disaster Recovery Plan Reduces Downtime After a Hurricane

Hurricanes are among the most destructive weather events that can strike a community. The high winds and flooding cause significant damage that can take months to recover from. It can also have a major impact on your business. On-site servers, paperwork, and other unsecured data can be destroyed, causing you to lose valuable information and increase downtime. With Louisiana and Texas being in the top three hurricane states, a company needs a disaster recovery plan that outlines the necessary steps to resume operations. Learn more about the advantages of planning for the worst.

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is a data loss protection strategy that details how your business can quickly resume operations after a natural disaster or malware attack. Your staff needs a concrete strategy that enables them to restore your IT environment, servers, networks, systems, and other components to reduce the effects of downtime.

How Does a Hurricane Impact Business Operations?

Louisiana is most at risk for experiencing a hurricane in late summer and early fall. When they make landfall, these storms generate significant amounts of wind and rain, as well as create storm surges that cause damaging floods. These elements impact business operations in the following ways:

Power Loss

The high winds and severe storms from hurricanes can damage utility lines and knock out power for an entire region. When this happens, any data and sensitive information that isn’t properly saved can be lost. Unrecoverable files make it challenging to resume operations and may impact your relationships with customers.

Server Damage

Does your company still store critical data on on-premise servers? If your facility experiences any flooding, your equipment can be damaged beyond repair. This causes permanent file loss and significantly affects your ability to maintain operations.

Lack of Employee Access

Employee safety is the most important consideration during a severe storm. Your staff should evacuate to a safer area before a hurricane. However, if your team members don’t know what’s next, it can delay your ability to communicate with them and maintain business continuity after ensuring everyone is ok.

Advantages of a Data Loss Protection Plan

While you can’t predict when the next hurricane will occur, you can protect your data by preparing for one. Implementing a business disaster recovery plan offers companies the following advantages:

Reduced Downtime

Having a comprehensive plan in place allows your staff members to take the necessary steps to reduce downtime and resume business operations.

Improved Customer Retention

If you can’t serve your customer’s needs after a disaster, then they will look for a company that can. With a disaster recovery plan, your business can maintain services and continuity for your clients.

Image of a person using a laptop in a data center.

How to Build a Business Disaster Recovery Plan

The best time to start building your disaster recovery plan is now. Here are the steps that help protect your data following a severe weather event:

Step 1: Inventory Assets

Before creating your plan, you must know the IT assets your company uses. Take time to learn what equipment you need to maintain daily operations and analyze the potential impact of not having access to them.

Step 2: Identify Essential Components

After cataloging your IT equipment, identify which ones are essential to your daily operations. This includes the hardware, software, cloud services, and data that allow your employees to serve clients.

Step 3: List Potential Disasters

Hurricanes aren’t the only events that can impact your company. Cyberattacks, like malware and ransomware, can also cause downtime and affect your ability to access data. Understanding potential problems allows you to prepare for them.

Step 4: Assign Roles

Your staff needs to know what to do in order to reduce the impact of a disaster. Determine everyone’s role and make sure they understand their responsibilities. Also, create a line of communication that eliminates gaps and maintains continuity.

Step 5: Establish Goals

How long can your company afford to be offline? Determining your recovery time objective (RTO) provides key insight into how quickly you need to resume operations after an outage occurs.

Step 6: Prioritize Data

Prioritizing sensitive data and making sure it’s protected is important for business owners to stay operational and maintain compliance with regulatory committees.

Step 7: Find a Remote Storage Solution

Using on-site storage solutions increases your exposure to physical damage. Finding a remote storage solution reduces the impact of fires and floods.

Step 8: Test Your Plan

An actual disaster shouldn’t be the first time you try your plan. After developing your strategy, walk through every step with your staff to verify they know what to do in a worst-case scenario.

Does Your Disaster Recovery Plan Protect Your Business?

Don’t wait until a major weather event to find out your strategy is inadequate. Contact National Networks today for a free consultation and start building your plan.

Schedule My Free Consultation

Let National Networks Build Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Creating a data loss protection plan is a time-consuming process, especially for small to medium-sized businesses that lack the resources. National Networks offers business continuity and disaster recovery services that enable our clients to resume operations quickly.

Our team leverages our two decades of experience to develop a plan that suits your processes, operations, and goals. With National Networks as your managed service provider, you receive disaster recovery strategies that offer the following advantages:

Controlled Costs

National Networks takes pride in offering comprehensive services that eliminate hidden fees. Partnering with us provides cost transparency and allows our clients to better budget their resources.

Improved Recovery Time

We understand that every second counts when your company is offline. Our team works with you to develop a disaster recovery plan that minimizes downtime and allows you to quickly resume operations.

Contact National Networks today to learn more about how our data loss protection strategies minimize downtime.

How a Disaster Recovery Plan Reduces Downtime After a Hurricane

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

How Does a Hurricane Impact Business Operations?

Power Loss

Server Damage

Lack of Employee Access

Advantages of a Data Loss Protection Plan

Reduced Downtime

Improved Customer Retention

How to Build a Business Disaster Recovery Plan

Step 1: Inventory Assets

Step 2: Identify Essential Components

Step 3: List Potential Disasters

Step 4: Assign Roles

Step 5: Establish Goals

Step 6: Prioritize Data

Step 7: Find a Remote Storage Solution

Step 8: Test Your Plan

Does Your Disaster Recovery Plan Protect Your Business?

Let National Networks Build Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Controlled Costs

Improved Recovery Time

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What We Do

Louisiana

Texas

How a Disaster Recovery Plan Reduces Downtime After a Hurricane

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

How Does a Hurricane Impact Business Operations?

Power Loss

Server Damage

Lack of Employee Access

Advantages of a Data Loss Protection Plan

Reduced Downtime

Improved Customer Retention

How to Build a Business Disaster Recovery Plan

Step 1: Inventory Assets

Step 2: Identify Essential Components

Step 3: List Potential Disasters

Step 4: Assign Roles

Step 5: Establish Goals

Step 6: Prioritize Data

Step 7: Find a Remote Storage Solution

Step 8: Test Your Plan

Does Your Disaster Recovery Plan Protect Your Business?

Let National Networks Build Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Controlled Costs

Improved Recovery Time

Share This Post

Related Postings

What We Do

Louisiana

Texas

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