When a disaster, natural or otherwise, strikes a place, community, or business, it may very well feel like all is ended and there can be no recovery. But it is crucial that the aftermath of the disaster to be one of careful consideration and wise choices so that there can be a restoration of the highest possible degree. Recovering from a disaster or a disastrous situation is hard, but not impossible, and with the help of disaster recovery services it can now be more manageable than ever.
Our overview of the top disaster recovery services will let you know exactly what type of help you should look into before the unfortunate event, for people, communities and businesses alike. We will put a special emphasis on disaster recovery services for businesses and small businesses in particular since this type of services and less well-known and the smaller companies can usually go down forever in the aftermath of a disaster.
A. What Disaster Recovery Services Are Most Needed?
In the aftermath of a natural (or artificial) disaster, emergency intervention teams are always on the move and striving to help as much as possible, but even these specialists have their limits. The cooperation, help and even the preparedness of those needing help is crucial to the success of the disaster management teams. Whether the disaster is a natural one like a tornado, big storm, flash-flood or earthquake, or an artificial one like a terrorist attack, the involvement of bystanders is vital. In most cases, the general public must truly get involved in the recovery missions if anything along those lines is to succeed.
Still, knowing when to stand aside and let the professionals do their job is also of the upmost importance. Disaster relief teams are not only well-trained on the type of challenges which come with unfortunate events, but they are also equipped with the required infrastructure and intervention kits. To get a better overview of how disaster recovery services work, here is a brief list of the top most important such services, in the areas of humanitarian help and in the area of business recovery as well.
Disaster Recovery Services for People and Communities
1. Firefighter Services
Almost all types of natural disasters also cause the occurrence of fires, but that’s not all the reason for which firefighting teams are of vital importance in disaster relief. Their main quality is that they are also trained and qualified to find people who remain trapped under rubble, which is one of the leading causes of death in the aftermath of disasters.
2. Danger Removal Intervention Teams
These experts are usually sent in to neutralize all traces of danger still looming in the aftermath of a disaster, whether the issue at hand is electric wires gone wild, a potential explosive material or a building about to collapse.
3. Humanitarian Relief Work
After the first two priority services presented above, teams handling all other aspects of disaster relief come in. This includes providing people with food and water, medical help, shelter and clothing, as well as helping family members find each other through the chaos.
4. Resilience Training Teams
When the immediate life-threatening danger has passed, another type of experts are ideally brought in, with the mission of helping the community rise back to its feet. Their areas of training include restoring a livelihood to the community and reducing further risk.
Disaster Recovery Services for Businesses
How about disaster recovery service (usually abbreviated to DRS) for business owners (LTD ventures)? For preventing an unfortunate event from proving to be fatal to your enterprise, these are the most important services (we will continue the numbering of the top from where we left off above):
5. Disaster Recovery Cloud Services
Nowadays, online data are a vital part of any business activity, and the loss of that data can have handicapping consequences on all future activity of that company. That is why backup and disaster recovery services are an extremely important and increasingly popular pack for businesses worldwide.
6. Insurance for Environment Recovery
Not just your business data is important, but the work environment as well, from easily replaceable but necessary components like office space and furniture and computers and onto more specialized equipment which may take longer to replace. In order to make sure the recovery of your work environment doesn’t ruin you as a budding business, you need to be properly insured. A good disaster prevention insurance should cover as much of the expenses required for recovery as possible. Furthermore, if you opt for a comprehensive disaster recovery service pack (the kind which also provides cloud storage backup for your data), you should also have temporary access to a working space nearby, capable of hosting a limited number of people until your offices get reinstated.
7. Disaster Recovery Overseer (or Overseeing Team)
Depending on the size of your enterprise, you can assign only one person to this task or you can assign a whole team for it. The main idea is that someone should already know how to access all of the services above optimally, where to obtain the funding, what legal counselling to call, where to order replacement equipment from and so on. This person should have a very clear list of steps to be followed in case of disaster, which brings us to our main section.
B. Steps to Follow in the Disaster Aftermath (for Businesses)
In order to be prepared for an optimal and timely recovery in case a disaster strikes, it’s crucial to have a disaster preparedness checklist created in advance. In order to create the ideal checklist, especially if you are a business, you first need to identify your recovery priorities along the aforementioned two main lines: the recovery of your environment (physical activity space) and the recovery of your data. Identifying your priorities and formulating a disaster recovery plan are ideally completed with the help of a disaster recovery consultant team (for businesses).
Here is a simple example of how should this checklist look like, in order to get a better idea of how to create yours:
- Call the required authorities in order to pronounce the disaster created, and initiate the insurance fund-accessing procedures.
- Get in touch with the service ensuring your cloud data backup and let them know you will be needing all the info (and perhaps some office space as well) for resuming your business activity.
- Select the employees who are qualified (and still capable) of resuming work in a low-maintenance stance so you can keep producing your services and keep in touch with your customers. Get them in the office space still available (or that provided by your disaster recovery service team) so they can start right away.
- Have your PR specialist create a press release alerting both the general public and your clientele of the unfortunate event, your sympathies for those whose lives were affected by the disaster and your commitment to help them out (and to resume your business activity).
- Have a legal counsellor (or your insurance agent) advise you about potential compensations that you may be needed to offer your employees if they were harmed in any way by the disaster. Your future productivity through this critical time depends on them, so it is in your best interest to keep them happy.
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