Why Real-Time Disaster Recovery Needs to Be a Critical Part of Your eCommerce Business Processes

“Make ‘business continuity’ ‘business as usual’ and embed it into your management routines as decisions are made, instead of an afterthought, check off the box exercise later.” – Bobbie Garrett

Business continuity management, or disaster recovery management, needs to be a vital part of a successful eCommerce business model. Furthermore, it is important for e-retailers to bear in mind that consumers in the Information Age are accustomed to having instant access to almost everything that they require. Therefore, to keep your customers, and your business, it is critical that you have a real-time disaster recovery plan in place to keep your computer systems up and running all the time.

The Financial Impact of a Disaster

It is important to consider the impact of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) on the sales of an eCommerce retailer. CRO is the system for increasing the number of visitors to your website and converting them into returning customers. It is easier to convince a returning customer to continue purchasing your products than it is to convert a new visitor into a returning customer. Statistics show that the ROI on returning customers can be more than 15 times that of new customers, while the ROI on new customer conversions remains consistent at 4 to 6 times at best.

Let’s presume you are an eCommerce retailer who has just experienced a disaster and your website has gone down, thus, preventing customers from transacting on your site. Not only will you lose sales while your website is down, your CRO figures will drop drastically because your website is not available for visitors to browse through.

Real-time Recovery

To ensure your customers keep on returning to purchase from your website and new visitors are afforded the opportunity to convert into returning customers, it is important to implement a robust disaster recovery or backup plan.

In order to swap seamlessly from your primary information systems to the secondary or backup systems, both need to be kept in sync with each other. An important part of the DRaaS model ensures that both your business’s primary and secondary systems are maintained in sync in real-time. Without this real-time service, you will not be able to swap seamlessly between the two systems.

A Prepared Business Is a Successful Business

The practical application of real-time disaster recovery in the form of DRaaS is essential to your daily business operations.

Not only will your profitability take a knock from the actual system downtime, but the damage to your brand’s reputation will also add to the long-term reduction in your sales figures. It is far easier to ensure you have a healthy disaster recovery plan in place than it is to try and repair your brand’s reputational damage.

Take a look at our real-time disaster recovery solution SecondSite, powered by Zerto.

 

Twitter   [wp-svg-icons icon=”twitter” wrap=”i”]   LinkedIn  [wp-svg-icons icon=”linkedin” wrap=”i”]

Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service Infographic

Disasters commonly interrupt business operations.

The difference between companies which successfully minimise interruption to operational productivity and those which don’t is in their business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Our Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) infographic outlines the dangers of disasters and downtime to your data centre, and ultimately your business. It also shows how quickly businesses typically recover, why testing is important, and much more information relevant to you.

disaster recovery, business continuity, DRaaS, RaaS