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Survival of the Fittest A Guide to Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Business

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If your business and your competitor experienced data loss today, who would be more fit to survive? Natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires can wipe you out, but what about your run-of-the-mill catastrophes? Power outages, file deletion, employee-caused errors and viruses are the most common sources of data loss.

Avoid being caught in a situation where your business is at risk of losing important information and becoming non-operational. Develop a set strategy that will allow you to restore order to your business in the wake of a disaster: Create a disaster recovery plan for your organization.

1. Conduct risk assessments. The first step in creating a disaster recovery plan is identifying the potential risks and threats to your business. What interruptions might strike your business? What types of disasters are commonplace in your industry and/or region? Is equipment failure your biggest threat? Will local internet connectivity or data security be your downfall? Outline these potential risks and identify their severity levels.

2. Monetize the impact of potential threats. Assess both the tangible and intangible costs of downtime for you company. What is the cost of lost business and revenue during downtime? How will those costs impact your business? How might a disaster affect the perception of your company to current and potential customers?

3. Research ways to manage risk. Take inventory of the important functions of your business, including data storage, voice/data communications and sales. Discover ways to keep those assets safe and manage risk. Reviewing insurance policies and contracts will help you formulate a more accurate plan.

4. Develop a written strategy. Create your disaster recovery plan. Include the possible threats to your business and the action steps to combat each. It is imperative that your organization includes information regarding the following:

• Safety Measures - How do you plan to keep your employees and information safe? Outline evacuation plans and know what measures will be taken to keep important data and information secure.


SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST | A GUIDE TO DEVELOPING A DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Di•sas•ter Re•cov•ery Plan -noun di-'zas-ter ri-'ke-ve-re 'planDeveloping processes, policies and procedures to recover a technology infrastructure in the event of an interruption/disaster

POWER OUTAGES FILE DELETION VIRUSES EMPLOYEE ERRORS

• Business Continuity - How will you continue to operate if the physical location of your business is destroyed? Include plans to set up temporary offices or have employees work from home. How do you plan to access data and recover information if it is lost? Who has the authority to make critical decisions? All of these questions should be answered and mapped out in detail.

• Communications - How will you keep employees, investors and the press informed of your situation? More importantly, how will you continue to do business with your customers? If call data is lost or power lines are down, how will employees reach prospects and current customers?

5. Practice your plan.Share your disaster recovery plan with your company and test it. If you include plans to have employees work from home, pick a day to have them carry out business from alternative offices. Conduct evacuation drills and familiarize employees with safety measures. In doing so, you can evaluate your plan and adjust accordingly.

While a disaster recovery plan may not completely eliminate the chance of fallout, it will greatly increase your chances of remaining operational in the wake of disaster. Simply put, you’ll be fittest to survive.

Fathom VoiceA solution for keeping internal and external business communications alive when catastrophe hits is necessary. Many business look to cloud communications and fully-redundant services like Fathom Voice for a solution.

Because Fathom Voice is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, call data and information is stored offsite in the “cloud.” This means that critical business information is safe and recoverable because it is stored over the internet. With ten mirrored data centers worldwide and automatic failover, calls are transferred within seconds to an alternative data center if one is destroyed. Not to mention, phones can easily be moved to alternative locations if working from the physical office is not possible. If phones are destroyed, calls can be forwarded to cell phones, and voicemails sent directly to email. What does this solution mean for your company? As long as your employees have an internet connection, they have access to their customers, press and fellow co-workers.

Five-Nines GuaranteeFathom Voice provides an industry leading ‘“five-nines” Service Level Agreement, or a 99.999 percent uptime guarantee for our network. That translates to only five minutes of downtime per year.

SecurityPhone calls made on the Fathom Voice network travel over secure call paths through the internet, or cloud, to the end user. These call paths are encrypted and decoded to provide the best call and data security possible. In other words, your call data is always safe and secure.

RedundancyFathom Voice has ten servers worldwide that are completely mirrored. This means that is one server were to go down the data stored there would be automatically transferred to another, unaffected data center.


SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST | A GUIDE TO DEVELOPING A DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Disaster recovery is built into our service, meaning our clients have a better way to communicate even in the wake of a disaster.