We know you’re busy.  If you’re not handling a customer inquiry, you might be working on a new enrollment, or trying to answer an agent commission question, or following up with one of your carriers - the list goes on and on.

We would urge you however, to take a quick moment and ask yourself - does my health and life insurance agency have a disaster recovery plan in place? In a conversation with NU Online, David Paulison, former executive director of FEMA said “Small businesses that don’t have a plan in place generally don’t survive after a disaster, whether it’s a flood or a tornado. We see that anywhere from 40-60 percent of those that are hit like that simply don’t come back to business.”  He then added, “The truth is that it’s not that difficult to put a plan together to survive any type of catastrophic event—a disaster or something like H1N1.”

When you hear the term “Disaster Recovery”, you may immediately think of a large event like Hurricane Katrina, but you may be surprised that natural disasters are not the leading cause of data loss.

Take a look at the following results from a study by Strategic Research Corporation showing the leading causes of business continuity incidents:

• Hardware Failures (servers, switches, disk drives, etc) - 44%
• Human Error (mistakes in configurations, wrong commands issued, etc) 32%
• Software Errors (operating systems, driver incompatibility, etc)14%
• Viruses and Security Breach (unprotected systems are always at risk) 7%
• Natural Disasters 3%

Agencies that use AgencyBloc entrust us with their most important asset - their book-of-business.  This responsibility is not something we take lightly - all data is backed-up (in the cloud) to multiple hard drives in multiple locations constantly.  When you leverage our SaaS platform, we ensure all the hardware and other components that run the software continue to function properly.  If one of our agencies were to have to leave their offices, they could still service their clients from an internet connection to access customer contact information, policy information, benefit summaries, etc.

Regardless of your agency management system, every agency needs to have a comprehensive plan in place to ensure preparedness for any major event.  Don’t let the thoughts and tasks be overwhelming; it all starts with education, and thankfully organizations such as the Small Business Administration and FEMA have free and helpful resources:

SBA - http://www.preparemybusiness.org/
FEMA - http://www.ready.gov/

You’ve undoubtedly worked hard to build your insurance agency - don’t lose it to a fire, power outage, earthquake or other disaster. If you’re not prepared, a disaster could put you and your staff at risk, possibly shutting down your agency forever.