Disaster Recovery / BCP

Unexpected disasters can strike at any time, and when they do, it’s essential that you have a backup business IT services and security continuity plan ready. The problem is most small businesses either have substandard backup plans with limited functionality or none at all.

With disaster recovery services from Be Structured Technology Group, you’ll no longer have to worry. We make sure that your data is monitored at all times and backed up consistently. 

Enjoy peace of mind knowing that all of your important information is backed up and secure. We’ll also sit down with you and help you create a business continuity plan so that you’ll know exactly how to deal with it when something unexpected does occur.

We Work With Your Entire Organization to Build the Best Plan

Disaster Data Recovery for Your Business

Backing up your data, fighting viruses, and network monitoring are all important aspects of IT. However, do you have a plan in place for how business operations will continue in the case that everything goes south? 

At Be Structured, we have the solution. 

As a company that prides itself on being the premier company for IT consulting in Los Angeles, we work with every department of your business, including sales, operations, and your c-level employees, in an effort to build a practical plan for how operations will continue even after the worst possible scenario occurs. 

This is one instance where your entire company needs to be involved because everyone will need to react to a disaster in different ways. For example, your customer relations team will need to be ready to answer customer questions, while your operations team will need to know what operations need to come to a temporary halt and which are safe to continue. 

Everyone needs to know their role in a disaster because such an event affects everyone from the newest hire to the most senior investor.

Disaster Recovery Statistics

Nearly 60 percent of small businesses that lose their data go out of business within six months. This is because not only do they have to deal with stolen information, they also have to handle the PR nightmare that comes with this type of disaster. Clients often abandon a company that has had its data compromised, even if no customer information was lost. This loss of confidence in the business is often more damaging than the actual loss of data. When a business becomes known for falling victim to a cyber-attack, it doesn’t matter how strong that business’s security was or what measures they had in place. Customers only see that hackers were successful in attacking the company, and they begin to doubt whether the business can recover.

Even if your network wasn’t attacked and your data not stolen, it’s possible your data was destroyed. A fire, earthquake, tornado, flood, or other natural disasters can level your office, destroy your on-site servers, and ruin your paper backups. 

What do you do then?

 Where do your employees work? 

Where can you meet with your clients, and what services can you possibly offer them if you’ve lost everything? 

This type of disaster can leave you just as vulnerable and lost as a cyber-attack, but how many business leaders have thought of it? It’s easy to say that it will never happen to you, but that way of thinking leaves you open to losing your entire company if it does.

With our disaster recovery and business continuity plans, you don’t have to worry about this happening to your business. After meeting with the various teams at your company and performing a risk assessment of your business, our outsourced IT support services experts will analyze the critical operations and functions of your company.

With all of this information, we will develop your business continuity plan. By analyzing everything, we can effectively predict the recovery time for all of your systems after an incident. We also build a backup strategy and deliver solutions for quick restoration. 

Our solutions utilize hard drives to redundantly backup your data. We store a copy on-site, at a remote location, and for an optional charge, we can even store data at a second remote location in a different geographic zone. By storing the documents away from your primary location, it helps to ensure the redundancy that you’ll need. 

If anything happens to your original data, we can get your business back up and running again. We can also work with you to understand both your recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) to make sure we craft a solution that meets your precise needs.

Many businesses find themselves at a loss as to what to do after such an event occurs. They don’t know what data they can recover. In the event of a hack, some don’t even truly know what information was taken. Instead of jumping into action to deal with the disaster, upper-level management spends time in meetings coming up with a plan while employees find themselves simply waiting and speculating about the future, especially if they no longer have an office to report to. 

Customers are calling to demand to know if their information is safe, while vendors and partners want to know status updates.

With a business continuity plan, none of this happens. 

By working through various disaster scenarios and creating tailored responses to each, your executives don’t have to come up with a full plan on the spot. At most, you’ll need to tweak one of the prepared plans to fully fit the situation, but often, even that’s not necessary. 

Simply pull up your plan and execute it. Company leadership will know what to do and say, your employees will have tasks to focus on, and you’ll have the talking points you need to craft your own press statements outlining the disaster and how you’re responding to it. 

There’s no panic or sense of loss of control.

What Should my Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan Include?

• Where your employees should report if your physical location is damaged or destroyed.
• The location of important documents and important contacts, including your company insurance policy, how to contact the office landlord, if there is one, and other information. While you likely have this information, remember that your disaster plan may have to be implemented while you’re out of town or otherwise unavailable.
• The location of data backups and any hard copy backups.
• The standard operating procedure employees should follow until instructed otherwise. This may be as simple as “remain at home until contacted” or instructions to report to another location.
• What company executives and employees should tell customers, the press, and anyone else who has questions about the event.
• A list of all of the equipment the company owns, its value, the date it was purchased, and any other relevant information. This will be useful both for insurance purposes, and so you know what needs to be replaced. Be certain to update this list regularly.
• Your main business documents, including the mission statement, strategy, how the business is organized, your processes, etc. Having these documents in one place is helpful regardless, but it can be especially helpful to have if you have to rebuild your business.
• Who will lead the disaster recovery team, and who will be a part of it. These are the people who will be primarily responsible for getting your business back on its feet. This team should include representatives from each major department and shouldn’t necessarily be made up of just executives. Lower-level employees can often bring a unique point of view that helps shorten recovery time significantly.
• A list of the essential services you need to continue or return to providing as soon as possible. While some companies may not have any essential services their clients rely on, others may have clients dependent on them. Having a timeline for restoring those services is useful not only for your team but also for your clients.
• Have an overall plan for your business’s recovery phase. This includes where you’ll temporarily work out of, who will continue working and who will not (and whether or not these employees will be compensated), when you’ll begin purchasing new equipment, and other key factors. It’s also important to consider things you will have no control over. For example, if a hurricane hits your location, it may be weeks before you can actually return to the area to work. Your insurance company is likely to be inundated with calls asking about insurance checks. All of this is going to affect your recovery timeline.
• For Southern California based businesses, it’s also advisable to maintain an updated list of managed IT services organizations simply by Googling IT support companies near me and getting quotes for their services so you’re ready to react at a minute’s notice.

A plan for how the business will continue if no revenue is coming in. In major disasters, you may not be able to reopen your business for days or even weeks. What will your employees do during this time? While it’s not something you necessarily want to think about, having a plan for a major disaster is important. Consider what you’ll do if you simply don’t have the funds or the capability of rebuilding to your previous level.

Be Proactive With an Outsourced IT Support Business Continuity Plan

Preparing for the worst scenario will ensure you are protected for the future. 

Partner with Be Structured for a full BCP. Don’t be caught unaware—if you are, it’s much more likely that your business won’t be able to recover. 

By taking the time now, when you can properly focus on it without feeling stressed or rushed, you can build a business continuity plan that logically thinks through various scenarios. 

We will sit down with your team and help you look at different outcomes and determine the best way for your company to move forward after a disaster strikes.

Some business owners, especially those with smaller businesses, may believe spending the time to create a business continuity plan is wasteful for them. As far as cyber-attacks go, they don’t see their business as a target. After all, they’re a small company that doesn’t make a huge amount of money or has a great amount of consumer data, especially when compared to multi-billion corporations. 

However, cyber-terrorists and hackers often go after these smaller companies because of this very attitude. These small business owners often don’t put as much into their security or have any kind of backup system in place. Attacking them is easier, and when the hacker is done, the business is left to pick up whatever pieces it can and attempt to move on.

Don’t let yourself fall victim to the idea that you have nothing worth protecting. Every business does, even if it’s not sensitive customer data. Your own data, including your internal documents, processes, and methods are vital to your company. 

Keeping them protected, having backups, and being ready for a breach is something you need to focus on. In today’s ever-evolving world of viruses, hackers, and malicious programs, it’s becoming more a matter of “when” rather than “if” a hacker will attempt to get into your system.

Natural disasters are much the same. Just because a tornado, earthquake, or other disaster has never hit your area before, there’s no guarantee that it won’t occur in the future. 

The world continues to change, and that can change the types of disasters that occur. In the midwestern part of the United States, for example, earthquakes have increased in recent years. Today, Oklahoma has more earthquakes per year than California, a state that sits along the earthquake-prone San Andreas fault line and has been the site of some of the largest earthquakes in the U.S. Businesses in the Midwest may have never thought they needed a disaster recovery plan for earthquakes, but they do now.

Be Proactive and Prepare For Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

A disaster strikes, and you lose everything; as a result, the business has to be put on hold. How are you going to serve your clients? Where will employees be working if you lost your office? 

Be Structured provides documented continuity plans for businesses so that your company can minimize downtime during the aftermath of a disastrous event. We consult with you and truly aim to understand your business so that we can write up the ideal plan that prepares you for the worst. 

There is no better time than now to plan for what may happen tomorrow; plan and be prepared with Be Structured. For disaster recovery services and a business continuity plan that will set you up for future success no matter what happens, contact our team at Be Structured Technology Group.