You don’t need to be repeatedly told just how important risk management is. If you did, you probably wouldn’t have made it this far. One problem you see from business owners today is that while they understand just how many problems there are--and which ones they need to find solutions for first--they want to grow their company so fast that they overlook potential problems and end up hurting their business as a result. This month, we thought we would talk a little bit about contingency planning and how, if it is done right, it can have a marked effect on your business’ ability to carry-on after a problematic event. 

You know the phrase, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket?” 

The idiom comes from the novel Don Quixote, and is used as a lesson to not put all of your efforts and success on a single thing. For computing, we say it like this:

“Don’t put all of your data in only one place… or else.”

Do you run into a scenario like this in your work? You are out of the office and you are made aware of a situation that has resulted in an irritated client. You call the client to make things right, and you successfully smooth the situation over. A while later the client wants to discuss something with you and he calls your personal phone directly. You try to politely direct him to use your business line, but over time, he makes your personal line his business’ support number.

For the modern business, ensuring that you have contingencies in place will go a long way toward keeping you in business if disaster strikes. One of the contingencies many businesses choose to make as part of a business continuity strategy is a disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery is more than restoring data, it can mean mobilizing people and capital against time. Let’s take a look at two of the core components of a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy, Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective. 

You’ve heard it over and over for the past several years: data loss is a disaster. A data breach can ruin your business. Ransomware is a business’ biggest enemy. Your reputation can never recover after a data breach. These statements may be redundant, but if you don’t heed the message behind them, you will likely regret it.