Protect Your Data and Your Customer Relationships
Last week I pointed out the importance of having a disaster recovery plan. In that post, I wanted to emphasize first, that natural disasters like floods and hurricanes aren’t as rare as you might think—and effect businesses than you might think. Second, I wanted to remind business owners that many other types of disasters can decimate or even ruin a business. A major power interruption or equipment failure can have catastrophic impact. Even labor disputes can cause major havoc.
Today, let’s discuss the actions you need to take to protect your business. You will want to choose a competent partner to help you with the process, and I’ll discuss that in a moment. But if your business is to survive a disaster, you need to address two major areas of concern.
Recovering From Disaster
A disaster recovery plan helps ensure that, frankly, you will have a business to run after the worst is over. This is business survival, at its core. And its most important principle is this:
If your data is lost, your business is lost.
Business runs on information. What if a disaster wiped out the information powering your business? Order tracking, production status, supplier and customer identification data, internal budget and staffing details, all gone. You would be hard-pressed to resurrect your business to its former level.
Thus, you should have a disaster recovery plan in place right now that will preserve all your data. (Waiting until the disaster strikes is obviously too late.) A redundant, off-site data capability must be established. Your data must be protected from physical elements through fire suppression systems, careful climate control, power supply redundancy and more.
Security must also be in place to ensure your data is not vulnerable to hackers or other cyber threats. If you can protect your data from these and other kinds of destruction or tampering, you have the materials you need to restore your business relatively quickly.
Keeping Your Customers … Happy
Fine, let’s assume your data is safe. You can rebuild or reconstruct physical facilities; your data will then allow you to restart your business. But … that doesn’t mean your business won’t suffer significant, and perhaps fatal, damage along the way.
A business continuity plan will help you keep doing business. With the help of secure backup data, print, web and email capabilities housed safely in other locations, you can continue to perform essential business functions. Your employees can continue to service clients … and get paid.
All communication with customers and documentation to accompany transactions will be routed to the temporary hosting equipment. Standard procedures can be handled without interruption; reviews, approvals, printing, and confirmations can be processed in a normal fashion. But you retain total approval authority for every document released. Reports, receipts, statements and more can be mailed or emailed as needed.
This is an impressive technical achievement, but it’s “softer side” is perhaps even more important. Customers prefer continuity, and they depend upon you to meet their needs. If you cannot meet those needs, customers may lose trust in you, or worse yet, choose alternate providers. But when you deliver buttoned-up customer service throughout a disaster, their loyalty grows.
A Safe Choice for Your Business
To make all this happen, you need to choose an experienced partner. At Superior, we work with Digital Data Centers to help our clients protect their businesses. We offer:
- A centralized facility in Glendale, IL, and a redundant center in Tempe, AZ.
- A track record of up to 99.7% uptime to keep you online and in business
- Advanced confidentiality, virus protection and data security protocols
- 24-hour active network monitoring
- TWO assigned account managers for customer support when a plan is activated
We’ve helped businesses survive and thrive for nearly 100 years. And today’s customers appreciate it. That’s why they selected us for the Best of Print and Digital award for the second consecutive year. Our ISO certification shows that our systems and processes are consistent and customer-focused. All good reasons to count on us to protect your business.
Contact Superior today to get started on a disaster recovery plan for your business.
