It's a scenario that could just turn into your worst nightmare: Disaster strikes, your networks are done, and your precious company data is in limbo. Are you prepared for this ghoulish scenario? Because if you're not, your business stands to lose time, money and perhaps most importantly, customers. Can you withstand that kind of damage?

Most managed service providers (MSPs), cloud providers and VARs tell their customers repeatedly how important it is to have a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan in place. And they are happy to sell recovery design and implementation services to their clients. But how many of them are practicing what they preach and implementing disaster recovery for their own businesses? Surprisingly, not enough service providers are setting up safeguards and the results can be horrific.

Just ask the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, who experienced the devastating loss of lives and property following the 2011 earthquake. That loss extended to business data as well, and enterprises and service providers alike learned their lesson after experiencing such a powerful natural disaster.

Christchurch MSP vBridge experienced a massive 1,110-percent increase in demand for its virtualized infrastructure services following the earthquake. The company has taken a number of BDR measures to ensure customer’s data is protected, including recently expanding its HP Converged Infrastructure. The end result is that vBridge believes it has mitigated its clients' business continuity risks by up to 85 percent by moving on-premise data to a virtualized environment.

Similarly, MSP Colorado Computer Support (CCS) stressed the importance of having a solid disaster recovery plan in place following this summer's devastating wildfires in northern Colorado. CCS stores its own data in the cloud and has a disaster recovery plan ready in the event of an emergency, and offers the same services to its customers and prospects - many of which did lose valuable data during the natural disaster.

Offering disaster recovery services to your customers is not enough, and MSPs and other providers are taking a major risk by not having their own BDR plans in place. A webinar titled, "Disaster Recovery Horror Stories: Simple Ways You Can Avoid Data Loss and Protect Your Business,"  aimed at MSPs, VARs and other providers, will be held on October 23 at 2 p.m. ET to help providers avoid having their own disaster recovery horror stories.

To register, click here.