How to Determine the Impact a Disaster Will Have on Your Business

When drafting your disaster recovery plan, it’s important to define which business process and functions are critical and what financial or operational impact the loss of those processes could have on your business.

Understanding Impact

First, you must define the risks that your business could most likely face. Common ones include:

• Power outages,
• Server outages,
• Natural disasters like floods or snowstorms, (depending on your region),
• Employee data theft or compromise,
• A department or the whole building is destroyed,
• All data, records, technology, supplies are lost,
• Some key personnel is unavailable,
• Hacking,
• Operations cannot be restored for over 30 days,
• Disaster occurs during a busy season for your industry,
• And so on

Basically, every business model will need a ready-made plan to recover from different risks, depending on your industry and geographic location.

Next, to determine the impact these risks would have on your business, you must sit down with every department or work group to define how suffering these risks would affect their operations.

Once every department discusses how their department, their work output, their efficiency and their budgets will be impacted by a variety of different circumstances; contingency plan drafters can clearly see what processes need restoring quickly and which ones can wait.

For every department or workgroup, it’s important to define:

• Who has the authority to restore processes and access secure files,
• How much time it will take to restore each process after complete disaster or loss of functionality,
• What steps they must take in the event of certain disasters,
• How many staff members work in that department,
• Which processes the department or work group controls,
• The priority ranking of each process or function the department carries out, and
• What the financial impact would be

Contact us today at Infiniwiz. We know that your business relies on technology. We can back up your data and make sure your business suffers minimal downtime in case of disaster.