Disruption comes in many forms. Are you ready?

It’s that time of year again. As Mother Nature makes headlines with storms of all sorts, thoughts about IT resilience often become a little more urgent. But it’s not just the weather. Cyberattacks, equipment failure, and human error quietly account for far more business disruptions throughout the year.

While the sources of downtime are many and varied, one thing is clear: there's no time like the present to review, update or expand your plan to ensure your business stays online, and minimize the potential for disasters of any sort to disrupt your business.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to protect from data loss and major disruptions to operations. Read on for a variety of resources to help you ensure your business can weather the storm.

Review, update and test your plan regularly

A Disaster Recovery plan helps you identify your Recovery Time Objective (RTO, the amount of time between failure to restoration that your business can handle) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO, the maximum amount of data loss that your business deems acceptable after an outage). Often times, these two key goals vary by workload. Periodic review ensures that updates to the plan can be made as business objectives change. Regularly testing your plan can drastically improve your odds of weathering the next disruption and could identify areas of improvement to minimize downtime.

If you already have a disaster recovery plan, do you test your disaster recovery plan regularly? 21% of businesses never test their Disaster Recovery plan.