Despite downtime and other inconveniences that might have inhibited productivity, 1.8 billion gigabytes of data was created throughout the past year. Much of that data was integral to companies and business. Unfortunately, many businesses also suffered a catastrophic loss of pivotal data in 2013. While there are several ways in which data can be lost, businesses can also cut their losses by developing and implementing disaster recovery plans.
Data can disappear quickly for a number of reasons. Current top causes of data loss associated with business downtime include UPS battery failure, human error, surpassing UPS capacity and cyber attack. Other causes of data loss that contributes to downtime include equipment failure, water incursion, weather-related issues, heat or cooling-system failure, and circuit-breaker issues.
Data-loss disasters take an epic toll on affected businesses. Of those that experience catastrophic data loss, 43 percent never reopen. Of all businesses closed for 10 or more days due to data loss, 93 percent will file for bankruptcy within a year, and only six percent of businesses without a disaster recovery plan will survive.
In order to implement an effective disaster recovery plan, businesses must understand and manage risks. First, they need to perform a business impact analysis and rank data by level of importance in a recovery plan. Second, companies should perform a risk assessment in order to identify points of failure or weakness within the overall infrastructure. Finally, a business must manage risks and implement solutions to minimize those risks based on the information gathered.
