HEROware: Small Businesses are particularly vulnerable during disasters - by Lynn Shourds

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. According to a recent article published by the Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), "As meteorologists predicted, this year's Atlantic Hurricane Season is producing a high number of hurricanes and tropical storms."

This increased activity is a reminder of the importance of having a business continuity plan, according to the IBHS. Diana McClure, IBHS's business resiliency manager says that, "...of the small businesses that are forced to close due to a disaster, at least one in four never reopens. The reality is probably higher than that, because most statistics just cover the first two years, and some businesses hang on for two to five years before they give up."

Running a business isn't easy. The threat of going out of business due to disaster is real. Most companies don't look at DR (disaster recovery) until something happens. It's sad to say, but the realities of having a BC (business continuity) plan are viewed in terms of "well nothing bad has happened yet." This is the exact mentality that leads to a company going out of business.

There are so many types of disasters. As I often say, most of those are local outages and are within a company's own data center or server closet. However, a disaster event can be a "natural disaster, an intentional or unintentional human-caused incident, a technological failure, pandemic flu or high absenteeism. A loss is a loss whatever the cause", says McClure.

The number 1 and 2 things the IBHS says to Not Do are:

1. Do not plan in a vacuum: Build a team within the organization representing different departments/functions and take into account external factors (dependence on infrastructure, suppliers, customer base).



2. Do not keep critical information and data in only one place: Regularly back up critical information and data and store it off-site or online.



I know today's blog post was mostly about this article, but this is very important stuff. I can wait to write my own thoughts; this article and these points need to be disseminated.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/