Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Discover the Benefits of an ECM System That Supports Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
What constitutes a disaster? This is a question that every organization must confront to sustain business continuity when unexpected events limit the ability to work. Oftentimes, disaster recovery is viewed as a strategy for bouncing back from a period of sustained business inactivity, but this is only one way to look at disaster recovery. In the context of a business continuity plan that incorporates Enterprise Content Management (ECM), the concept of disaster recovery can be applied to preventative measures that nullify the effects of force majeure events to begin with. With a reliable ECM system in place, your business can eliminate paper — the most common cause of operational breakdowns during a disaster.
What Constitutes a Disaster?
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes, and not all businesses are vulnerable to the same disasters. A disaster for a manufacturer might be a sudden supply chain shortage, whereas a distributor is more likely to worry about sudden shifts in weather patterns during an especially tumultuous season. Therefore, when planning for business continuity, consider the unique challenges your business could potentially face in addition to those that affect all businesses. Commonly cited disasters include:
Natural Disasters
- Earthquakes
- Fires
- Floods
- Hurricanes
- Tornadoes
- Volcanoes
Societal Disasters
- Civil Unrest
- Economic Collapse
- State of Emergency
- Pandemic
Technological Disasters
- Hardware Failure
- Power Instability
- Malware or Viruses
Disasters in the Real-World
As we mentioned above, the disasters your business faces won’t necessarily come from the sky. In the real world, a disaster is anything interrupts an organization’s ability to maintain production of its primary goods or services.
The most common “disaster” is human error, which accounts for 60% of all business interruptions.
Needless to say, disasters can happen unexpectedly when nothing crazy is happening in the world. Your disaster might be experienced by only your organization or even a single department. Regardless, you need to have a solid plan and the technology required to support that plan if you want to avoid interruptions.
Statistics Highlight the Dangers of a Lackluster Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan
An ECM system safeguards your organization’s business-critical content against damage, mishandling, tampering, and other potential threats. By reducing your organization’s reliance on paper and streamlining non-standardized business processes, your organization becomes insulated from disaster. Companies that fail to do so face some pretty steep challenges as evidenced by these statistics:
- 80 percent of businesses that suffer major disaster go out of business in three years.
- 40 percent of businesses that experience a critical IT failure go out of business with one year.
- 44 percent of enterprises fail to reopen following a fire, and of those that did, 33 percent failed to survive beyond three years.
- 93 percent of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy with one year of the disaster and those without data management filed immediately.
- In the past two years, over 50 percent of businesses experienced an unforeseen interruption, and the vast majority (81 percent) of these interruptions led to business closures of one or more days.
- 34 percent of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77 percent have found backup tape failures.
Don’t let these “doom and gloom” statistics intimidate you. Disasters are a very real threat to business, but the solution to prevent disasters from affecting your business is readily available in the form of ECM software by IntelliChief.
