Not Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan Could Cost You Everything

Disaster recovery planning is a very large topic, and data backup and recovery is only one part of it.

To give you a real-life example of what this means, consider a recent posting on Reddit. A System Admin receives a ticket saying that the power is out in their office in Kiev and that the UPS battery is down to 13%. In response, the technician at the office simply shuts down the gear.

The next day, they see a news report stating that the entire building that housed their Kiev office is no longer functional. Fire and collapsed floors have completely devastated it.

The System Admin ends the post by asking: How's your disaster recovery plan? And have you tested it?

When you begin developing your disaster recovery plan, you need to account for both everyday incidents and large-scale, seemingly unlikely events. If you already have a plan in place, does it address what happens if your office is destroyed or inaccessible? Have you considered the loss of multiple connectivity points? And just as important, when was the last time you actually tested your disaster recovery plan end-to-end?

When to Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan

It is a good practice to update and test your disaster recovery plan whenever large changes are made. But what about when everything is configured the way you want and nothing major has changed?

Treat it like your smoke detector. Twice a year, when the time changes and you replace the batteries in your smoke detectors, test your entire disaster recovery plan.

That testing should include asking yourself questions and exploring “what if” scenarios, such as: What happens if Bob, the main System Admin, is suddenly unavailable? What happens if the building is on fire and everything inside is lost? What happens if the cloud service you rely on for production, backup, or disaster recovery suddenly shuts down?

All of these situations—and many more—need to be accounted for if you want to recover from a disaster and keep your business running.

Not Making Time for Disaster Recovery Could Cost You

For many organizations, the hardest part of disaster recovery is simply making time to create and test the plan. “Not enough time” is the most common excuse. But this is really a question of priorities. If disaster recovery planning and testing sit too low on your list, they will never get done.

A practical way to raise the priority is to put a real number on downtime. Think about what each minute, hour, day, or week of downtime costs your business. For example, if an hour of website downtime costs $3,000 in lost e-commerce revenue, extend that over several hours or days, and the potential losses become massive—and largely avoidable. That still doesn’t include the revenue lost from potential customers who never return after a bad experience, or the damage to your company’s reputation. Even in a relatively small-scale incident, the true cost of a disaster adds up quickly.

The reality is that if you think data loss will not happen to your company, you need to think again. Studies show that 74% of companies have experienced data loss in the workplace. Even more concerning, 32% of companies take several days to recover from that loss. During that time, operations are disrupted, customers are impacted, and revenue is often lost.

The scary truth is that 16% of companies that experience significant data loss never recover. In other words, a single incident can be enough to shut a business down permanently. When you think in terms of the potential financial impact—lost productivity, missed revenue, remediation costs, compliance penalties, and long-term damage to your brand—it becomes clear that disaster recovery is not optional.

Understanding this risk should help you prioritize your disaster recovery planning and regular testing. It also makes it easier to justify the investment in planning, infrastructure, backup software, cloud storage, and ongoing validation of your recovery processes. These are not just IT expenses; they are critical protections for your entire business.

Benjamin Franklin said it best: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” When it comes to disaster recovery, failing to have a well-documented, thoroughly tested plan is a sure way to set your company up for failure when a disaster occurs. Without a reliable backup and recovery strategy, a major outage, cyberattack, or data loss event could cost the company everything.