Disaster recovery planning is a necessity nowadays, and is widely seen as an effective way of proactively protecting a business’s interests. As the saying goes, “prevention is better than cure.” Business continuity and recovery planning can help you save valuable time and money, which is critical in ensuring survivability.

Disasters are inevitable, especially since modern living is more sophisticated and complicated than ever. Nowadays, businesses anticipate disasters more proactively as their landscape continues to fill up with more developments — both good and bad — every day.

Many internal and external factors can lead to the disruption of business operations. Let’s take a look at the top threats on the minds of business leaders in 2019.

Cyberattacks and data breaches (Cost to companies in 2018: $144 million)
According to the 2019 BCI Horizon Scan Report, a document accomplished by the Business Continuity Institute in partnership with the British Standards Institution detailing the results of their global survey regarding business continuity trends, cyberattacks cost businesses $144 million in 2018.

While this threat category ranked fourth last year, it rose to first place this year due to how even Google and Facebook fell victim to cyberattacks in 2018.

IT and telecom outage (Cost to companies in 2018: $307 million)
Downtime caused by internet connection issues is a major concern for businesses because it cuts off revenues from online sales, makes remote workers unproductive, and halts cloud-based business processes.

Data backup and replication are important processes to consider when drafting an information and data strategy. These two work hand in hand, but are often (incorrectly) used interchangeably.

Backup and replication are two different things. Below are definitions that can help you differentiate the two so that you can design your data strategy better.

More and more businesses are turning to cloud-powered solutions for their enterprise needs, as these solutions tend to be flexible, affordable, and just as powerful as most traditional business solutions. In fact, many small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) nowadays are fully cloud-powered, meaning all of their data and transactions go through the cloud.