From 1953 to 2019, New Jersey experienced 51 major disasters, including tsunamis, earthquakes, and tornadoes.
As a result, businesses that weren’t properly prepared lost proprietary data, experienced data breaches, and some never recovered.
Having a business go down due to a natural disaster is financially devastating, as the average cost of downtime for a business is almost $4,500/minute. What’s even more frightening, though, is that disasters affecting your business will happen, it’s just a matter of when they do. And if you aren’t prepared at that time, your business could completely capsize.
Most businesses that aren’t prepared during disasters suffer because of incompatibilities between the recovery DR site and the actual production site caused by the DR site not being updated or properly maintained. However, this puts your business at major risk.
This article will show what New Jersey currently has in place to help businesses after a disaster, what other tactics businesses use to help prepare themselves, and what can be improved on to ensure any business is 100% ready for any disaster.
How Does the State Help?
According to FEMA, the most severe natural disasters New Jersey faces are severe storms and hurricanes.
And though they have these severe natural disasters, the state doesn’t provide much help for businesses to prepare.
In fact, according to their emergency preparedness website, they simply have education and awareness programs for businesses to attend. And then they link to an article about how small businesses can prepare for a disaster.
This is definitely not enough information to help a business properly be ready for a disaster, recoup their losses, and be able to stay open after a severe storm or hurricane happens.
Overall, not a lot is provided by the state to help businesses prepare and recover from disasters that are bound to strike.
Current Recovery Plan for Businesses
A common way for a business to prepare for a disaster is to have an annual DR test performed.
However, only 50% of businesses actually perform a DR test. An annual test fails to provide realistic expectations of what to expect. As well, priorities for that test will change with the seasons, leaving gaps in what to expect in a disaster.
On top of that, current recovery tests are complicated, time-consuming to conduct, and difficult to manage (which is probably why businesses don’t like doing them).
To compensate for not regularly testing, businesses are spending a lot of money on cybersecurity and data protection, yet in the case of a natural disaster, this isn’t enough to ensure information and property are kept safe.
IT professionals know just how huge this risk is for a business — operations can be disabled in the event of a natural disaster, ransomware attack, or employee error can occur.
The only way that a business can properly plan for a natural disaster is to have frequent, thorough, and automatic DR testing.
A New Way for Disaster Recovery
New Jersey has some government assistance put in place, and businesses do some DR testing. However, it’s not enough when an actual disaster strikes.
Businesses that experienced actual disaster events in New Jersey found that 40% was their average. The reason was incompatibility between the production site and the DR site.
Issues between these two sites generally occur because, while you are using your production site every day, it is being regularly maintained and updated to reflect the best practices. Your DR site, however, is not. It is the differences between these two that are present at the time of disaster that cause more issues than anything else.
Because of this, the first step to keeping your business 100% disaster-ready is to have regular testing performed. Testing annually for DR leaves room for gaps and doesn’t give businesses the confidence they need that they’ll be ready in the case of an actual disaster coming.
Instead, your IT team should be running weekly DR drills that cover all of the issues you might face if a disaster were to happen. An efficient test should include turning the DR scenario on in a bubble network and thoroughly testing the servers, the domain controller, the applications, the databases, web portals, network connections, resources and so on.
Key Takeaways
The loss of data, important information, and possibly your whole business isn’t a risk worth taking—especially in New Jersey where there is an increased risk factor for natural disasters. Undoubtedly, it’s important to evaluate how ready your business is for a disaster.
The DR plan must show evidence that your business can function in case of a disaster. As opposed to hoping that disasters won’t affect you, you should embrace disaster simulations (DR tests) and use them to be 100% ready. Don’t settle; your business should function in case of a disaster.
From having regular testing to backing up data and having a reliable option to back up the equipment storing it, and even having a Recover Readiness Score conducted, there are a lot of options out there to help businesses feel 100% prepared for any disaster.
If you want to be ready for any disaster that could come your way, EnsureDR is here for you. Contact one of our sales reps for a demo at 877-418-7005 or by filling out our contact form here.