There is a 60:1 odds you will experience a burglary at your home or business (London Free Press article of March 23, 2012).  In the event this or any other potential disaster, do you have a business continuity plan for your employees and your business?

Recent extreme weather has heightened awareness to the importance of disaster planning for businesses, large and small. But destruction of your company’s infrastructure is not limited to natural disasters-it can happen anytime.  Misfortunes like computer crashes, network breakdowns, and power outages threaten your business each and every day.  On average 43% of business that experience a disaster never re-open.

“A sound contingency plan can enable your small business to respond effectively to a crisis, and prevent that crisis from becoming a full-fledged disaster,” said Tom Serio, Director of Business Continuity Management for Office Depot.

According to Serio, the overarching principle in disaster planning and recovery is to protect your most valuable and irreplaceable assets: your people and your data. Among the guide’s other recommendations:

Keep contact information for employees and local emergency services, as well as key vendor and supplier information, updated and easily accessible. Establish a clear process for communications and plan how you will contact one another in different scenarios.

Protect your business from faltering after a disaster by backing up key data on a regular basis.  Backup the data to removable media and store in a secure off-site location.  Don’t want this hassle?  Use offsite backup services, such as Canada Offsite.

Periodically review the data being stored on any back-up systems to ensure that the right data is being copied and that it can quickly be restored in the event of an emergency.

Contact Nivsys to get more information on how to protect your business and avoid a potentially disaster.