Imagine, what would happen if your office burned down? If there was a flood? if your building were hit by a meteor? Would your data survive? Could your company recover? Do you have a plan? Business owners are asked these questions every day and, often, these questions keep them up at night. Knowing that your company is protected in the event of a disaster is priceless. Especially when we know that a majority of companies that do not have disaster recovery plan will be put out of business when disaster strikes.

Apart from the noticeable benefits of peace of mind and business continuity, having a disaster recovery plan in place will immensely help your business. Here are some of the important ways in which disaster recovery planning can benefit your business.

• Network Management

The disaster recovery planning process puts everything into perspective, including your underlying network. Through the process of thorough documentation of the network protocols companies can fully comprehend the network, making it easy to mend issues quickly.

• Employee Responsibility and Task Allocation

A disaster recovery plan is only as strong as the people executing it. For this purpose, inspiring your employees to take part in the DR planning process will give them more investment in your company and the plan as a whole. It’s good to know that if disaster strikes employees will be on the same page with how to handle it. Moreover, outlining particular roles and tasks for employees to undertake in a disaster situation helps to ensure a fast and effective recovery. Thus your business will experience less downtime and face less loss with an organized employee response.

• Cost savings

One of the major benefits to disaster recovery planning is the long-term cost savings it offers your businesses. With an effective DR strategy in place companies can recover quicker, avoiding the costs of lost revenue and lost customers associated with downtime.

• Asset Management

The DR planning process puts the complete inventory of all of your assets into one convenient location. Not only is this beneficial in terms of disaster preparation, understanding where and what your assets are makes managing them easier.

• Testing

The beauty of planning for a disaster in advance of one actually occurring is that you have the ability to put your plan to the test. A step that many companies tend to skip due to the time and effort that it takes to conduct, testing a disaster recovery plan is one of the most crucial steps in the planning process, and holds numerous benefits for your business. How can you spend the time to plan and not be certain that your plan will actually work? Testing a DR plan allows companies the benefit of trial and error. Additionally, they can uncover weaknesses in the plan and modify it accordingly. Testing a DR plan will save time as well as money in the long run and guarantee that a business is, in fact, protected in the event of a disaster.

Bottom Line

The disaster recovery planning procedure is like insurance for your IT environment. Actually having a plan in place should the worse happen is essential to business continuity. And while a disaster recovery plan helps companies stay organized in terms of recovery, it has numerous other benefits that include cost reduction and timesavings.