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Better Not Pout: The Price of No Disaster Recovery Plan – Forbes Article by Ntirety CEO Emil Sayegh

December 18, 2020 by Ntirety

Hackers, hardware failure, human error—is your business willing to roll the dice without a disaster recovery plan? Don’t trust the odds of naughty versus nice when it comes to your business IT systems and data.

Published in Forbes on December 1, 2020, Ntirety CEO Emil Sayegh’s article Better Not Pout: The Price of No Disaster Recovery Plan explains why disaster recovery plans are an essential investment of time that no organization can afford to skip. The end of 2020 is a nonstop wave of cyberattacks on big name private sector companies and federal agencies, and the holidays only heighten the risks for businesses across industries.

Learn about this non-negotiable task for every business – and how professionals can sleep better at night with “visions of sugar-plums dancing in your head” without IT worries.

Read Emil’s full article below or on Forbes.com here.

Better Not Pout: The Price of No Disaster Recovery Plan

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse

Seriously now, imagine yourself ahead of the most important e-commerce season of the year for your company. A tech disaster at this moment would be harrowing – and Murphy’s Law tells us this is the time when these events tend to happen. It is during moments like these that you must have a strategy and a team ready to execute your plan flawlessly.

Because, as the Christmas poem goes you don’t want this to happen:

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter

There was a time not so long ago when disaster recovery plans did not consistently get their due day, and even perhaps got a few eye rolls. That sentiment has drastically shifted as more businesses than ever rely on highly available and reliable digital transactions. Even a minor security incident can wield significant impacts that, in many cases, affect company revenue. It’s enough to make heads spin – a challenging task that covers business process contingencies as well as means of technological recovery.

So Many Risks

A loss of data and unplanned technology interruptions can cause a company’s base to crumble. Real-world circumstances and threats create a state of never-ending peril and include difficult-to-plan-for risk factors:

Human Error – People make mistakes. Administrators might miss a piece of code. They may mistakenly apply tools directly in production instead of test environments. Users are also vulnerable, which is part of the reason spyware and virus distribution continues to be successful. One errant click could cause a domino effect, bringing down an entire organization.
Hack Evolution – Threats exist from all walks of life, including call attempts, physical breaches, even walking through the front door. Those are difficult, risky tactics and most criminals prefer to leverage the evolving cybercrime tactics that we see attack IT systems prevalently today.
IT Failure – A missed process, a broken configuration, gaps in security, hardware failure, network issues – IT systems can and do fail. Some of the components are physical, others are virtual and many of these failures trackback to circumstance.

If you haven’t had a chance to revisit or think through disaster recovery plans for all of these risk factors – especially when a new year is upon us – it is time to do so. In the competitive age that we live in, there is no margin for the types of outcomes that can be prevented or minimized by proper disaster recovery planning.

Could your business afford data loss due to a security breach, human errors, or natural disasters? Can the average business sustain another business interruption, downtime, or loss of productivity? Ultimately, can you afford to lose clients, and are you ready to have difficult and serious conversations with customers about the data that was lost?

Rolling Without – DON’T

Whether malicious in nature, based in nature itself or attributable to human error, the far-reaching effects of an IT disaster are avoidable with regular planning and continual revisiting. We all take measures to ensure our personal health, our employees, our vehicles, and homes, but precautions, procedures, and policies that affect organizations often get left out due to insufficient focus. Consider the levels of impact a disaster can have instantaneously and long-term:

Financial Losses – Immediate
Operational Dysfunction – Immediate and Intermediate
Reputational Loss – Potentially Long-Lasting Damage

Envision how and what your business would need to recover from a technological, experience, and customer relations perspective and you will be on the right track.

With good planning in place, recovery times can be minimized reducing lost revenue and time. System backups, system resiliency, and operational procedures are just some of the elements that make dependable companies dependable. An essential investment of time, disaster recovery plans are a non-negotiable task for businesses – far from an IT luxury – and how to sleep well at night with