08 May The Ecclesfield Fire – Tips For Avoiding Disaster
Over the weekend seven fire appliances attended a large industrial fire that took place at Yarra Industrial estate in Ecclesfield. We are pleased nobody was hurt but a number of businesses have been destroyed and we hope these are back up and running with minimal losses
We must be mindful that businesses face threats, and even in the UK can be hit by floods, Tornados, Hurricanes and Fires. Most of us are not blessed with a gift of clairvoyance, and whilst we cannot predict disasters, we should plan for them. Gartner recently reported that only 25% of mid-sized business have a comprehensive Disaster Recover plan.
To help you think about the steps you could take to ensure your business is ready to survive below are a few tips.
Make a Plan
You need a plan! This will require effort. Your plan should outline what happens if things go wrong. Include emergency contacts and processes and define how you will continue to operate if disaster strikes.
Map Your Threats
Map the types of risks you could be exposed to and the impact these could have on your operation. For example, a plush office by the side of a river is more likely to suffer a flood than the one up the hill. Start to prioritize the services that you need to run and the timescales you could operate without them. Would you be able to cope better if accounts were down for a few days? Rather than if you lost your phone system?
This will help you to create a plan that focuses energy and efforts on the core and critical things needed to get you back up and running with as little downtime and lost revenue as possible.
Protect your data
Whilst data loss can happen for many reasons, many organisations fail to take significant measures to back up data. I have also met many smug business owners who proudly tell me they back up to the hard drive in the corner – Yes that one in the corner, that stays in the office and promptly melts with the rest of the data in the fire that wipes out the office.
You need to have an effective offsite backup and recovery measure in place. This prevents data loss and can be restored as part of your disaster plan.
As optimistic and positive as we all may wish to be, we cannot walk around without covering risks or planning for unforeseen catastrophic events. If so, none of us would have home, car or life insurance and these industries are doing very well.
Just a little work around what could happen, and how you will deal with this could prove to be the difference between to success and failure if the worst should happen.