Disasters Do Happen. How Will Your Manufacturing Facility Survive?
Your manufacturing business needs a comprehensive plan for disaster recovery. Natural disasters are not regular occurrences. However, business interruptions due to ransomware, malware, data loss and company-wide systems interruptions happen every day. They happen to companies just like yours. If a disaster or cyberattack happens, you want to be prepared to address the issues quickly and have an actionable, tested plan ready to deploy.
Let’s take a closer look at what a disaster recovery plan entails, why your business needs it and how to create one.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Many conflate business continuity and disaster recovery. While they’re related, there are clear differences.
Business continuity is the broader approach, involving the policies, priorities and people that will guide efforts to keep a business operational during a disaster. It’s the work of keeping a business running seamlessly with minimal downtime.
Disaster recovery is a critical tactical subset of business continuity. It’s the functional process of restoring data and applications necessary to run the business in the event that networks, servers or other infrastructure is unavailable.
Why Disaster Recovery Is So Critical
Disaster recovery is a vital part of your continuity planning. Without a rapid-response solution to get access to apps and data, your manufacturing company likely will not be able to function. Here are three of the core reasons why disaster recovery is crucial:
- Failure Rate Is High. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 90 percent of smaller companies failwithin a year of a disaster unless they can resume operations within 5 days. Forty to 60 percent of small businesses never reopen. Those are dire statistics that point to the need for speedy recovery.
- Cloud Technology. With the advances in cloud technology, there are ample opportunities to improve disaster recovery work. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) using the cloud helps alleviate concerns about limited resources and budget, providing accessible and affordable options. With the cloud, there’s no need to invest in costly infrastructure and plans can be deployed quickly. The cloud is an ideal choice for multi-location companies and requires less testing time and personnel.
- Response Times. Time is money and can be the difference in long-term viability. Your response time for disaster recovery will be far faster if your company has a plan. Disaster recovery is about having high availability of services that ensure continuity.
How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan
When you’re ready to begin building your plan, there are several high-level needs, including:
- Determine Your RTO and RPO. Manufacturers need to have clear and reasonable time windows.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is your company’s measure of how long your system can be down before it seriously impacts your business. It’s the desired amount of time before operations are restored that avoids major consequences for business continuity.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is at what point in time data can be retrieved. It defines your frequency of backups, how long backups take and how much space is needed to store backups.
- Business Process Prioritization. Choices need to be made about which processes are given priority during disaster recovery. What processes and areas need to come back up first?
- Disaster recovery means identifying likely risks to business operations and assigning a likelihood value.
- Prioritize and Cost Solutions. Once risks are identified, it’s time to develop solutions for each scenario, prioritize them, and price what it will take to develop disaster recovery solutions.
- Build, Test and Refine. Once you’ve agreed on the solutions, they need to be built and deployed. After they’re in place, your manufacturing company needs to test the processes, plans, solutions and people to make sure things run as planned. These tests help to challenge assumptions and often lead to revisions to the disaster recovery plan.
The final and most critical piece of the planning is to have a partner with the expertise and knowledge of manufacturing facilities to help develop a sound, realistic and comprehensive plan.
BCS CallProcessing specializes in technical support for manufacturers. Our data backup and security applications give you peace of mind and confidence that when any disaster strikes, your facility will be back up and running quickly. To learn more, contact BCS today.
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