Majority of business have insurance policy that is said to cover them in case of business interruptions and pay for disaster recovery. Yet, most businesses have not looked at the actual terms of the said policy and if they did, they may find out that their company is not actually covered. How so? It’s actually quite simple – they are not following the letter of the contract.
Most insurance policies that cover modern businesses stipulate that a said entity should have the following: a backup process for all business critical data and applications (which includes financial data, tax information and more), have a secure storage location for the backups, periodic tests of the system and disaster recovery plan. At best, most businesses will have a simple backup system where files and applications are simply copied to a backup device. While this is the first step of an important process, it won’t help one recover the business in case of a catastrophic event. What happens if the entire building is destroyed in an earthquake (which seem to rock Southern California monthly) or a wildfire that roll through the state every year? The systems and the backups will be lost. Even if the data does go to a secure location such as the Iron Mountain storage facility – that data alone won’t help you much in recovering the business quickly. You will need to order new hardware, the manufacturer will need to build and deliver it, you will need to hope that your backups work and that you can restore data to at least partially working state. Once that’s done you may be able to get everything going again. But how long is this going to take? The loses for a company can be so great, that unless it can actually operate during a disaster or immediately after – the entity may not have enough reserve to stay afloat. And if you did not follow through on your part of the insurance agreement and did not have disaster recovery plan, the insurer is unlikely to cover any of the costs. And you probably thought that IT operations in your company are less important than accounting.
This is where itSolace can save your business from a potential disaster – be it man made or natural. We can review and update your existing procedures to ensure data safety. If you do not have a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) to go along with the backups, you may not be covered by insurance or may simply not be able to operate through an extended period of distress, such as regional fire or major earthquake. We have designed and implemented plans that allow companies to resume operations in as little as few hours, even when their entire existing infrastructure (servers and network) is destroyed or inaccessible due to evacuations. Because of these procedures, clients can be assured that the company will survive almost any disaster and that their insurance will not be able to deny the claim in order to rebuild the business.
Here are the steps every business needs to make in order to be complaint and safe:
- Review all computer business assets
- Create backup strategy
- Implement backup system
- Test backup system periodically
- Move the backups to a remote location regularly
- Create a disaster recovery plan
- Assign people responsible for executing the plan
- Test the plan
- Keep the plan current and updated as people and company changes
- Keep all documentation to prove the existence and interoperability of systems to insurance company
Businesses within Southern California wild fire and earthquake prone regions are especially at risk of the data loss. If you operate a business in San Diego or Los Angeles area we can come to your site and do a very thorough review of your existing backup infrastructure and disaster recovery plan. The visit will include a full report about any potential risk and recommendations for improvement.
