What would you do if you had an unexpected flood or fire at your office? What if a strong storm caused the power to go out for days? Those types of disasters, whether natural or manmade, can be devastating to a business if they don’t have a disaster recovery plan.
A surprising 75% of small businesses haven’t planned for an unexpected work stopping event and 52% of small business owners say it would take at least three months to recover from a major disaster at their office.
And how much does all that downtime cost? For some, it can mean the end of their business because they can’t fully recover. For others, downtime can cost an average of $10,000 per hour due to lost business, lost productivity, and the inability to meet current and new customer requests.
Being properly prepared for the unexpected can mean the difference between relocating your base of operation within an hour or two or being down for the count.
Three-quarters of small businesses haven’t put together a disaster recovery plan.
At Digital Crisis, we offer several cloud services to Houston area businesses that can help them recover quickly in the event of a disaster at their office and that are designed to keep downtime to a minimum. Recovery can be much easier if you’re able to still run your business and bring in revenue while you’re dealing with your office damage.
Cloud solutions are a major part of any disaster recovery and business continuity plan. They allow a company to quickly switch their base of operations and ensure protection for their data and business systems should anything happen to their physical office and technology hardware.
Today’s disasters that threaten business operations come in all forms, including:
It’s important to be prepared in advance when any unexpected disaster strikes by considering the types of operations that will need to be re-established should your main office suffer a catastrophe.
One of the most critical parts of your business is your digital files. If your office is devastated by a natural event, you don’t want to add on top of that major loss of all your digital assets and data.
It’s important to disaster recovery planning to use a cloud backup strategy so all your data is being stored safely in the cloud and can be easily recovered to any device when needed. If you’re only using a local backup that’s located at your office, then you run the risk of that being lost along with your computers should something happen.
Cloud applications like Office 365 or QuickBooks Online ensure you have the tools you need to carry out business from any location.
Moving to cloud-based business apps not only makes sense financially, it can allow you to quickly move your base of operations in the case of an outage at your physical office and keep serving your customers, sending invoices, and collaborating with your team, even if everyone is working from their individual homes.
If your phone lines are down, then your customers can’t reach you. VoIP phones give you the same mobility as any other cloud service.
In the case of a disaster at your office, you can easily adjust “ring to” numbers from any internet connected device and answer your business phones from anywhere, so you’re still open for business even if your physical office is down.
A new trend that we’ve seen in business continuity and cloud solutions is a move to virtual desktops. Virtual desktops host your entire computer workspace on a cloud server, and you can log in to your computer from any device and from any location.
This ensures that you have access to what most people think of as their “main computer” even in the event of physical damage to hardware at your office, because virtual desktops house the operating system and everything loaded into it virtually, including all your files, emails, folders, etc.
Customer relationship management (CRM) programs give you one centralized place to capture all your customer communications from leads and existing customers.
With the right CRM cloud setup in a system like ZenDesk, you’ll still receive all your phone calls, webforms, chats, and other customer communications, be able to access them and respond, even if your main office has suffered a major disaster.
Cloud CRMs, like other cloud programs, can be accessed by mobile app, browser, or desktop app from any location, so you don’t have to worry about missing any new opportunities due to an office outage.
Digital Crisis can get you set up with an office that’s resilient and cloud-based so you can weather any disaster that may strike. We offer cloud backup, virtual desktops, VoIP phone systems, and more.
Contact us today to schedule a disaster recovery plan consultation. Call 713-965-7200 or reach us online.
