Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to disasters that can cause lengthy periods of downtime, which can be detrimental to their survival. While many business owners have taken some steps to protect themselves against disasters, such as having off-site storage for vital business records, few have a formal disaster recovery (DR) plan. According to Nationwide, 68% of business owners have no written DR plan, even though 49% said it would take three months to recover from a natural disaster, which is too long to survive in many cases. A comprehensive DR plan should include data replication, definition of priorities, role assignments, inventory of assets, and a remote work strategy. Employing a third party to manage oversight of your disaster recovery frees your IT team to focus more of its energy on business-critical projects. Whatever approach you take to DR planning, just be sure you don’t neglect to do it.