Hazard Insurance

Clusters of tornados last week and this week in the US Midwest once again bring one’s thoughts to the issue of insurance.

There are undoubtedly many small and mid-size businesses in Harrisburg, IL that are hurting right now, having had their offices damaged or destroyed by the tornados that hit earlier this week.

You can bet that those businesses, or their landlords, have insurance on the office buildings. The people who work at the businesses probably have homeowners insurance on their homes. But you can also bet that most of the businesses didn’t have a disaster recovery plan for their business’ information systems and data. And that means that most will go out of business in the next year.

Yes, no one enjoys paying insurance premiums. It feels like paying for nothing. You mail your check, and nothing comes back to you. For a nation of shoppers, it feels like a gyp. But, as a country, we’ve all been socialized to understand that insuring your home is smart. If you have young children, not having life insurance is irresponsible. We get that, even if we don’t like it.

But that same attitude still hasn’t sunk in with business owners when it comes to their info tech. If you’re a local insurance rep, or a banker, or even a baker, in Harrisburg, how on earth are you going to get your business going again if you lose all your data?

The irony is that having a disaster recovery plan, and spending money on a technical solution to protect and recover your computers, is an incredible investment. We know one mid-size law firm that avoided almost one million dollars in lost revenues because they could resume business as usual just two hours after a hurricane took out their primary data center. Just two hours! It was almost like nothing happened. At an annual “premium” of $50k, experiencing a similar disaster just once every 20 years means a positive payback for them.

Having a DR solution is a no-brainer for that law firm. And the way the numbers pencil out, it’s a no-brainer for any business that relies on computers and data to run their business, which is all of them. (Okay, I guess the one-chair barbershop in Harrisburg might be excused if they skipped the DR planning, but that’s about it.)