Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses

Part 3. RECOVER

Once the immediate effects of a disaster have passed, it is time to recover. You have taken corrective action as a direct response when you were directly hit by the disaster. Most likely, your disaster was a "minor" event, and you did everything possible to mitigate your losses. However, if it was a major disaster, you will need time to look forward and recover from the event. Maybe you have to reconstruct some data or maybe rebuild the whole office. Whatever the case, you have to keep your business interruption as brief as possible and resume normal operations and productivity as quickly as possible.

While you are working hard at rebuilding your business, you will face some unexpected challenges. Your business may suffer some attrition of customers and employees. Disputes with suppliers or customers that arise from the disruption of normal operations may result in litigation. This will exacerbate your stress and further delay your recovery. I have seen many situations in which the disaster recovery effort was delayed; in particular, the process of data recovery was stopped because employees were needed for critical delivery obligations. It is time consuming to restore data and this causes additional aggravation and frustration for the employees and clients. If I have not already convinced you, this is yet another reason why you simply cannot afford lengthy data recovery operations, particularly if you own or operate a small business.

Confounding recovery efforts are ...