Disasters can strike at any moment and your business is no exception. Be it a hardware failure that leads to the collapse of your online services or a fire that breaks out and engulfs half of your workplace, the key to running a successful business and keeping it afloat is a continuity plan. What this essentially means is that you have taken into account all the different kinds of problems your business could encounter and you have devised a plan of action to take should it happen.

Continuity Planning in Detail

If your business suffers from something that prevents it from operating normally, then you need a continuity plan in place (or rather, several) and a team of professionals to execute it if you want to continue operating. Depending on the size or scale of the disaster, you might have to amend your plans in order to account for every situation.

One such example of a disaster, as previously mentioned, is the possibility of hardware failure. Many businesses around the world heavily rely on information technology to operate their businesses. As a result, those businesses are very sensitive to hardware failures and there have to be several plans in place in order to detail with potential issues. For instance, if customer data is stored in-house on hard drives that failed, then the chance of recovering them is slim and without a backup, the data is most likely lost for good.

To prevent this disaster, it’s imperative that your business has off-site backup locations that are regularly updated and that sensitive data is kept encrypted and stored on another service, such as a cloud storage account. Regular backups mean that even if your data was to be completely wiped from your office hardware, it can be quickly recovered via the off-site backup location or the cloud. Whichever method you pick, it’s vital that you can access it quickly so that it doesn’t continue disrupting your service.

Knowing the Right Contacts

The correct way to go about restoring your business’s operations is to be in contact with the right people. For instance, if you run regular stock checks of your business then you might want to consider getting in touch with a barcode scanner repair service. Barcode scanning is incredibly important within the workplace if you are keeping an eye on stock numbers, and failure of that system could lead to a total collapse of your business until it is fixed. Having multiple barcode scanners is another method, but you also need to repair outdated or broken equipment in order to remain a functional business.

However, if there are no local services near you, then you’ll have to turn to online services. There are plenty of good contacts that you should get to know. For instance, if rely on accessing data from a network attached storage unit, then there is a possibility it could break or develop a failure. In this situation, if your continuity plan is in place then you likely have storage space for redundancy to account for failures. 

You can simply contact a data recovery service over the internet and they will be able to directly connect through the internet to your network and recover the files for you.

However, in a worst case scenario, you might need to physically take the hard drives to a location for a specialist to recover your data. Either way, it’s important that you act immediately, and knowing the right contacts is key to quickly restoring your operations.

This post has been contributed by Ryan Gatt, it may contain affiliate links.