In a digital environment that’s unforgiving when it comes to downtime and outages, planning for IT disaster recovery is a critical responsibility of the modern business owner. Despite this, an astounding 75 percent of small businesses have no disaster recovery plan in place.

If your SMB isn’t prepared for a disaster, it’s important to start by understanding the basic tools that will help you navigate and mitigate a crisis.

Here are five straightforward disaster recovery solutions your SMB should consider as part of an overall recovery plan.

Cloud backups

Cloud backups can be an excellent tool for protecting your data in the event of a disaster.

A data loss event can impede a small business’s operations and drastically increase its chances of closing within six months. By performing continuous backups to the cloud, your business can safeguard its data and reduce the potential impact of a disaster.

For this reason, cloud backups are becoming increasingly popular among SMBs. Approximately 78 percent of such businesses are expected to back their data up on the cloud by 2020.

Cloud backups also have the advantage of letting you keep data geographically remote to avoid complications from natural disasters. Experts recommend keeping your backups 200 miles or more from your actual location.

Virtualization

Like cloud backups, server virtualization is useful for keeping data safe, as well as for limiting the amount of downtime that your business will experience during a disaster.

Virtual servers allow businesses to create exact copies of their data centers. If a disaster strikes, this copied version can be used to maintain essential functions while the problem is solved. As a result, SMBs can maintain high levels of availability.

Virtualization is also extremely useful for disaster recovery testing, as tests can be run in the virtual environment instead of in your business’s main system.

Mobile communication and collaboration systems

When a disaster strikes, it’s critical that your team members remain in contact. By maintaining communication through mobile devices or social media platforms, your team can coordinate its disaster recovery efforts and minimize the amount of downtime that will occur without having to be in the same place at the same time.

With good remote communication and collaboration systems in place, your business can mobilize more quickly and launch a coordinated effort to mitigate the damage.

Uninterruptible power supplies

Disaster recovery solutions tend to focus strongly on software and data, but protecting business hardware is also an important consideration. For this reason, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can be a very useful tool in an emergency.

A UPS is a battery device that will provide temporary power and allow you to properly power down your hardware assets.

Monitoring solutions

Disaster recovery is often a race to keep downtime to a minimum. If you are forced to deal with a disaster involving your network, monitoring software that logs changes and unusual activity can help your team identify and quickly resolve the problem. In some cases, you may even be able to head the threat off before it develops into a full-blown disaster.

With proactive security monitoring, you can keep your business safe and keep your IT systems running more smoothly.

Ready for anything

Using these five tips, your business can begin to craft a basic plan for disaster recovery.

The more you can prepare now, the less likely your company will be to experience catastrophic failures when a disaster does occur.