Jul 11, 2023 | SMB Technology, SMB Technology, SMB Technology, SMB Technology, Technology News
As recent events like severe storms demonstrate, disasters will occur. But they needn’t sideline your business. Read more to find out about developing a plan to mitigate the effects of disasters on your company’s data and network. The Cost of Failing to Plan The cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute! Multiply that out, and you could be paying hundreds of thousands or even millions for lost revenue, lost wages (or overtime when systems come back online), or fines for regulatory non-compliance. Even if unplanned downtime is just an hour, the cost is steep. The revenue you lose because your customers can’t purchase items on your website, and even missed deadlines for projects, can hurt your bottom line and your reputation with customers. Data breaches from cyberattacks can reduce your customers’ trust as well, and possibly result in fines for regulatory non-compliance. By not having a plan, you may waste valuable time because you don’t know what to do first. Developing a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan A business continuity/disaster recovery plan is vital in protecting your company. The disaster recovery aspect deals with how your business will bounce back from a natural or manmade disaster. How do you develop your plan? A good first step is assessing the current state of your network as well as the risks your company faces. Do your systems have any holes where malware can enter or places where data might become bottlenecked? Do you have redundancy/failover so that if one part of your network is down, another part can pick up the traffic? What about equipment you have on-premise–is...
Jun 14, 2021 | SMB Technology, SMB Technology, SMB Technology, SMB Technology, Technology News
As the last year has shown us, we don’t know exactly what the future holds. However, with manmade and natural disasters like cyber attacks and power failures from storms, it’s a matter of when, not if, your company is faced with a situation that could threaten its operations. Read on to learn more about protecting your business with a business continuity plan. Building a Comprehensive Business Continuity Plan In its broadest sense, a business continuity plan is a proactive strategy to keep your business up and running during and after a disaster. That disaster could be a storm causing a power outage, or a ransomware attack like the ones affecting major companies in recent years. These can cause costly downtime that can hurt your company’s revenue and reputation. While data protection is part of the business continuity framework, business continuity plans go beyond to consider the relationships between people, processes and technology. A solid plan will take into consideration individual departments and their operations as well as how these departments work with the others. Risk management means evaluating likely threats, and the impact they’ll have on your business. Important Questions to Ask Your Technology Advisor Developing a business continuity plan starts with asking questions about each department. What are their functions, and who carries out which functions? What processes do they use to carry out these functions, and what data and applications do they use in these processes? What are the mission-critical functions, and what infrastructure is needed? Then, consider how the departments work together, including the IT and security teams. Consider looking at your...
Jul 3, 2018 | SMB Technology, SMB Technology, SMB Technology, SMB Technology, Technology News
With technology growing by leaps and bounds, and regulations assigned to protect the data generated by this technology, you need a business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place to determine how that data is collected, protected, analyzed and stored. Read on to find out how to protect your company from data loss and its consequences. Why You Should Care About Data Protecting Your Data According to COMPTIA, data protection will be a key trend in 2018 and beyond. Businesses will continue to generate large amounts of data; for some companies, regulations such as PCI, GDPR and HIPAA require protection of data and plans for business continuity in the face of potential data loss. Even without the need for compliance to regulations, businesses need access to their data even in the event of a natural disaster or a cyberattack. How Much Downtime Can you Afford? The average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute. Not only that, but if your business is inaccessible during a flood, fire or other disaster, or simply a power outage, customers can lose confidence in the product or service you provide. Even more serious is the prospect of confidential data being lost or exposed. Having a plan in place can make the difference in whether your business stays in business. What to Include in Your Plan How much data can you afford to lose, and how long can you be without it? The best plan provides for storage and restoration of data during and after a disaster. How long can your systems be down before it affects profitability? How will you restore data that...
Sep 12, 2017 | SMB Technology, Technology News
Recent Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, along with major earthquakes in Mexico, remind us how vulnerable we can be to disasters, and underscore the importance of data protection. As businesses depend on access to a range of systems–including call center, communications and collaboration application, customer management, and more–having a solid data protection plan can help you in a disaster recovery scenario. Now more than ever, a range of options exist to help maintain business continuity. Here are a few options to consider. Review Your Data Protection Plan Key to your data protection plan is identification of mission-critical systems. The most important systems should be redundant, with the ability for failover in the event of a disaster. Your data centers and failover options should be geographically dispersed and on different network backbones. This can minimize downtime and get you back up and running sooner. Having your data backup available in Cloud Storage can help you recover other important files and application data if you lose access to your on-premise systems. SD-WAN for Business Continuity Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) can also provide you a highly reliable and redundant network. Having the ability to switch Wide Area Networks using SD-WAN as an alternative to more costly MPLS solutions can ensure connectivity during a natural disaster. What’s more, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking can save you money in the long run by giving you the flexibility of a multi-carrier solution. Software as a Service for Disaster Recovery More businesses are turning to the Cloud for a range of applications–hosted email, Voice over IP (VoIP), Call Center, and others–to keep communications flowing during a...
Jul 18, 2017 | SMB Technology, Technology News
Reputation Management is a hot topic in the boardroom these days. Having a solid business continuity plan could make or break your company’s ability to survive a data breach or other systems failure that could tarnish your hard-earned reputation. Company news about data loss, systems downtime and other unplanned interruptions occur with regularity. According to technology research firm Gartner, a business that has a catastrophic data event has a two-year survival rate of just 6%. Surprisingly, your company can avoid these scenarios by having a solid BC/DR Plan. It is no surprise that recent research by MarketsandMarkets forecasts the spend on DR as a Service (DRaaS) to grow from $1.68 Billion in 2017 in revenue to $11.11 Billion by 2020. Read on to find out how a Business Continuity Plan could save your business. Understand Your Business Continuity Risk and Exposure A great place to start with Business Continuity planning is a review of your company policies and procedures. Your business continuity policies should — in addition to identifying the technical standards for managing your company’s applications, data, and related infrastructure — should identify acceptable risk, what your employees will do in a disaster recovery scenario, and identify any compliance requirements. It is important to understand what information is most important and to consider the risks of suffering a data loss. What would be the impact to your revenue, productivity and reputation? If you could not access your information, or it was subject to data breach, how may that impact your customers’ trust and your business’s reputation? An Ounce of Planning is Worth a Pound of Cure Ensure you...
