The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Disaster Preparedness: Recent Disasters Make Businesses Reconsider Importance of Disaster Recovery
Globally, over the last year there have been large numbers of both natural disasters and political turmoil. There has been the tsunami in Japan, earthquakes in Turkey and Brazil, and flooding in Australia, Brazil and Thailand, to name a few. In the US this summer, we’ve been hit with severe thunderstorms that knocked out power for days for large parts of the country and wildfires in the Rockies that destroyed millions of acres of land. Millions of people have been affected by these events.
Businesses too are also often hard hit when disaster strikes. But very often the problem is that disaster preparation is seen as a low priority. Many small and medium sized companies cut corners when it comes to devoting resources towards disaster preparedness.
A report from Aberdeen Research found that about 20 percent of companies have moved their Data Recovery operations to the cloud. But even cloud computing, which is often considered to be less vulnerable to regional disaster, was also hit by the recent storms which caused an outage in it’s Virginia facility. Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest websites, for example, which depend on Amazon were affected by the outage.
A report by HP found that:
- 43 percent of businesses never reopen again after the disaster
- 33 percent of businesses will close after two years
- 50 percent of businesses never fully recoup their losses after a disaster.
Jim Kirkos, Meadowlands Regional Chamber (MRC), said that “We need to get small businesses thinking about this. I don’t believe these severe weather incidents are going to stop. I think the days of the 100-year flood are gone.”
Al Berman, executive director of the Disaster Recovery Institute, said that “Last year was the worst year we’ve had in the history of disasters.”
Jim Beagle, chief executive officer of BridgeHead Software, said that “There is a lack of robust disaster recovery planning, despite the fact it appears to be a fundamental requirement for healthcare IT professionals… The situation is only going to get worse as…the datasets get larger and larger; this whole issue is becoming a growing problem for healthcare professionals.”
