Every organization has a common fear—loss of data. Data loss due to a disaster forces 80 percent of businesses to close their doors within three years. While the numbers are alarming, it doesn’t take much to prevent this from happening to you. We’ve compiled the top five steps to ensure a quick recovery should disaster hit.

1. Plan for Failure – Failure to plan is a plan to fail. The reason many small businesses don’t have a disaster recovery plan is because they simply think a disaster won’t happen to them. While major storms and fires don’t happen every day, human error and power outages do, and you need to protect your business when it happens to you.

2. Identify Data Locations – To effectively recover from an outage, you need to know where your data resides and assess each site’s recovery readiness. Every location—premise-based, cloud and remote office—requires recovery capabilities and seamless connectivity.

3. Organize and Prioritize – In the aftermath of an outage, the goal is always to resume normal operations as quickly as possible. However, recovering some systems may take longer than others so it’s important prioritize which are most critical and map out the order of recovery based on your key drivers of business. This also goes for application recovery—analyze each system’s recovery requirements and calculate how long you can tolerate an outage or go without access to data.

4. Automate Backups – Not so long ago, data backup and recovery was expensive. But thanks to cloud, you can accomplish security and accessibility at an affordable price with a centrally managed, integrated and automated solution that ensures backups take place regularly, and that the data is accessible when needed.

5. Educate Users – It’s important that every member of your organization understands their roles and responsibilities in the event of an outage or disaster. Proper execution of your plan is not enough, if your users’ roles are poorly defined, the entire continuity plan won’t be effective.

Unfortunately, no business is completely out of harms way when it comes to an IT disaster. The only way to mitigate interruptions when one occurs is to have a well-crafted disaster recovery plan—and we can help. Now through October 31, 2016, get a free, no obligation disaster recovery assessment. Together, we’ll keep your employees, customers and data safe.