Having a solid disaster recovery plan in place will ensure that your organisation can be back up and running smoothly when a major problem occurs. Network system crashes, supply chain road blocks, power failures, and major catastrophic weather events aren’t just risks, they are a reality for all organisations, from SMBs to large enterprise level corporations.
Disaster recovery planning in Australia will help to ensure business continuity when a catastrophic event occurs but it also may be necessary for maintaining regulatory compliance. Your business needs to have certain records kept, standards met, and systems in place in order to be included in industry networks and to show other businesses and customers that your company is capable of persevering in the case of a disaster. Do you know if your organisation is fully compliant?
Meeting Industry Requirements
Compliance requirements may vary by industry as different business sectors call for a specific set of standards. For example, health care and financial and insurance industries, where data loss would be catastrophic on a wide scale, may require a much higher standard for compliance than other industries.
Austraclear, a major financial market exchange for the Asia-Pacific region, requires financial organisations have to have a minimum disaster recovery plan in place. Austraclear requires a business continuity plan that addresses possible disruption scenarios, such as:
- An internal or third-party system outage
- Attempted or actual cyber-attacks
- Loss of primary electricity supply
- Network failure
National and International Disaster Recovery Standards
National and global standards, such as those set out by Standards Australia as well as international governing bodies like the British Standards Institution, help to keep organisations across the globe viable in cases of catastrophic events, viruses, or even human mismanagement. Businesses must adhere to these regulations in order ensure business continuity and also to demonstrate resilience to business partners, customers, and suppliers. Meeting certain standards and getting accreditation can be immensely beneficial to the long-term sustainability of your business:
- Helping to identify and manage current and future threats
- Minimises the negative impact of disasters
- Ability to maintaining critical functions, even during catastrophic events
- Improving reputation, as with regulatory compliance, you become a more attractive organisation to do business with
The Australian Business Continuity Standard AS/NZ 5050:2010 helps Australian businesses maintain a standard level of IT disaster recovery to protect against major losses.
How to Ensure that Your Organisation Has a Strong Enough DR Plan
Ensuring that your business meets national, international, and industry standards is the key to demonstrating a commitment to risk management – and to keeping your organisation protected. While regulations are a helpful framework, keep in mind that simply meeting standards or getting certification may not be enough to save your precious data and ensure streamlined operations when a major event takes place.
- Take the time to make compliance a priority
- Understand your industry’s disaster recovery compliance requirements
- Verify that you have the right IT infrastructure in place
- Protect your data and business applications, independent of your network, with a cloud-based DRaaS that maintains and tests your system
You can’t afford disaster disruption – the median cost for a day of downtime for a SME in the Asia Pacific is $14,500 per day. Of small to mid-sized firms, 65% predict that it would take anywhere from a week to a month to recover. For larger organisations, the costs will be even higher.
With Zetta, we’ll help to make sure that you meet and exceed compliance regulations. The goal of your DR plan should to have confidence that your business can recover quickly in the case of an IT disaster. Staying on top of regulations is an important step to ensuring that your business is ready to for anything – find out about our Disaster Recovery as a Service solution today.
