Disaster Recovery

Are you ready for a disaster? Would you be able to bring your dental practice back following a local or regional disaster? Most dental practices (and small businesses in general) are woefully unprepared as the following statistics highlight:

• Gartner estimates that only 35 percent of SMBs have any comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
• Touche Ross estimates, the survival rate for organizations without a disaster recovery plan is < 10%
• Evolutionary IT surveyed over 50 (non customer) offices and found a mere 20% had any disaster recovery plan as of 2011.

In this the first part of my 3 part discussion on disaster recovery for the dental practice I will discuss a few misunderstandings that many dentists and dental practice managers hold regarding disaster recovery.

Local Backup Is Enough

The assumption that local backup will keep you safe is incorrect. Local backup only helps you if have a local system problem or hardware problem. If any other type of local disaster such as storm, fire, smoke damage your machine you will lose your external storage, backup drive, etc. It is imperative to have some form of off site backup (replication, virtualization, or cloud solution) as well as onsite backup.

Recovering From A Disaster Doesn’t Require a Plan

Creating a plan in the case of disaster helps mitigate your risks, improve recovery times and lessen the possibility of data loss. It allows you the piece of mind in knowing you thought out the steps to returning to normal business operations. Without taking the time to do this you have know idea what you need to accomplish recovery, how long it will take and or the process details. A written plan will give you all the required detailed and make everything known quantities. A plan is a dynamic evolving process as your environment changes.

Disaster Recovery Doesn’t Need Testing

Most practices with an unseasoned “IT Guy” have backups set up automatically that run on a scheduled unmanaged/unmonitored basis. They don’t monitor backups, don’t test the validity of these backups and or test restoring the data. Without planning and testing you can’t validate your results. Most “IT guys” haven’t done a full recovery test and therefore won’t be able to bring you practice back online in a timely or cost efficient manner. It is imperative that you work with a provider that not only has a plan but updates, maintains and tests it on a consistent basis.

We must have a plan or we should plan to fail. Disaster recovery is an ongoing effort of both technology and process. What steps do you plan to take to be prepared?

When a disaster comes is your business ready? Hurricane Irene recently caused severe damage to parts of New England totaling over >$15 billion in damages. Many businesses were not ready, had no comprehensive disaster plan, and no real way to recover business operations. Would your customers, clients or partners be assured you have done your due diligence and prepared a proper disaster recovery plan? My customers always have one.

Seems like every time we near a disaster I get a influx of calls and emails to address these issues with new customers. If you aren’t currently working with a provider who is equipping you with a proper up-to-date and tested disaster recovery plan – its time to consider a change. Disaster planning isn’t optional or frivolous expenditure; its vital to the survival of your business. What’s your plan?

Disaster Recovery is no joke but for many firms it’s not taken seriously.  Organizations without a plan and calculated investment can suffer dire consequences.  Businesses risk serious financial and regulatory costs as well as the potential for insolvency.   Still skeptical?    Here are a few examples:

• Of companies that had a major loss of computerized records, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term. (Cummings, Haag & McCubbrey 2005.)
• In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, 150 businesses out of 350 affected failed to survive the event. Conversely, the firms affected by the Sept 11 attacks with well-developed and tested BCP manuals were back in business within days. (Howe School of Technology Management 2004.)
• In the case of fires, 44% of businesses fail to reopen and 33% of these failed to survive beyond 3 years. (IWS 2004.)

In the small business space it seems there are all to many I encounter which have NO plan. More painful still is that many don’t even backup critical business data. Why? Many are unaware of the true risk, are unaware of the potential costs or think it’s to expensive to implement a real DR (Disaster Recovery) effort.

One thing is clear from my 15 years in IT, DR is vital to the very survival of any businesses. A proper DR effort will bear fruits in many other places such as legal/regulatory compliance, cost reduction, increased security.

DR is not a destination or a static plan but a continual process. In my practice I endeavor to ameliorate this situation one client at at time.