How to Prepare Your Organization for Natural Disasters

June 1st, 2016 by admin

How much would you estimate a data center outage to cost an average organization?

a. $625 per minute

b. $10,300 per minute

c. $5,700 per minute

d. $8,800 per minute

As of 2016, an average data center outage costs about $8,851 per minute! (Tweet this stat!) Surprised? Consider all the areas that could be affected:

Lost sales
Damage to high-value data
Damage and repair of equipment
Disruption to employees' business processes
Any legal or compliance costs
Halted communication channels
Damage to client & other stakeholders' relationships
Overall time and resources wasted on resolving the outage

IT is never 100% disaster-proof. The most reliable and forward-thinking organizations will anticipate unavoidable emergency situations and are prepared to handle them with the appropriate responses and tools in case they come up.

Read on to find out the solutions that could minimize the damage or prevent the outage in the first place!

When your organization faces a problem that affects your business continuity, you'll want to minimize the damage by making sure you have a strategy from a disaster and a backup plan in place.

Some common solutions to potentially disastrous situations include:

1. Emergency Notification Application

Unfortunately every year, several organizations experience security crises. During critical and emergency situations, advanced applications can help coordinate the appropriate in-house response. ShoreTel's Emergency notification application allows you to increase your oversight and communicate in real-time so that your organization is prepared to respond to a security crisis.

Read more about emergency notifications.

2. Weather-related Backup Plan

ShoreTel offers several features and options to help out. Authorized contact and users can manage their ShoreTel Sky phone system from any place that has an internet connection. When severe weather events are in the forecast, ShoreTel features can help make sure our team is prepared in the event that one or more of your office locations are closed and you users find themselves working remotely.

Here's what you'll want to know to prepare for hazardous weather.

3. Disaster Recovery

Networks and servers can unexpectedly break down due to events like hardware failure, human error and natural disasters.

A traffic manager helps organizations plan for disaster recovery and business continuity, as it reduces your risk and costs across multiple data centers and cloud platforms.

Scale applications to support traffic load capacity, optimize server resources, route traffic around failures and review detailed reporting of application performance.

CONCLUSION:

Unfortunately, every year several organizations experience emergencies. Whether it’s a security crisis, weather crisis or hardware failure, being prepared during emergencies services is crucial to avoid huge costs.

An average business has about 14 hours of IT downtime per year which can cost anywhere from $55,000 to over a $1,000,000.

It's crucial to be prepared for these difficult-to-predict hours of downtime. Advanced features and applications can help your organization minimize the damage by helping you coordinate the appropriate in-house response during critical and emergency situations.