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Did you take a wrong turn on the road to disaster?

Can you find your way back if you take a wrong turn on the road to disaster? If disaster strikes, recovering from it could cost you thousands of dollars, plus lose your customer’s good faith.

Having a plan to save your business from bad things will help you get back on track.

Most businesses rely on technology to run their day-to-day processes. Think email, Word docs, customer information and ordering systems, inventory, accounting. Other companies are all about the tech. Think Uber, Airbnb, Constant Contact and many others.

So, if something disastrous happens, your business could grind to a halt, whether tech is your main business or ‘just’ how you get your work done every day. What could go wrong? Well, there's floods. Plus, electrical storms, hurricanes, fire and people who leave with your passwords or source code. Without a backup plan, your business could be in trouble.

What’s included in a plan?

Disaster plans can cover everything from how to get out of your store or office during a fire drill, to how to get back up and running if your servers are underwater.

Then, you can take it a step further. If you think about staying in business during a disaster, as well as recovery, you’ll be in the best shape you could be.

While it’s important to customize a plan for your business, every plan should include:

* Technology asset inventory that names mission critical processes and data

* Schedule for updating and testing any disaster recovery plans

* Clear understanding of the trade-offs between cost and complexity

Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. That’s why it’s important to understand how your plan works. If you are a business decision maker, you might hand this over to your IT team. But it’s important to ask some questions to make sure you have full coverage for your business. A few questions:

* Does your plan include an inventory of mission critical business processes and data?

* When was the last time anyone reviewed your plan? Tested your plan?

* Is cyberattack preparedness included in your current plan?

* How much depends upon human intervention?

Evaluate Cloud Solutions

During a disaster, humans have other priorities than failing over their virtual machines. Automating your solution is key to ensuring success.

A cloud solution can help you recover quickly. And it’s less expensive than having your own datacenter to support and protect. It’s a practical solution for a business, whether it’s large or small. But it makes especially good financial sense for a smaller organization.

Not all cloud providers are equal, so you’ll need to do some research to compare. A few considerations:

* Do they offer a hybrid solution, so that you can keep some data on premise as well as in the cloud?

* Do they offer metered service so that you can save even more money by ‘turning off’ services when you don’t need them?

* Is the service easy to use, with good support for your team?

* Do they offer geo-redundancy?

* Are they compliant with your industry?

Is the cloud safe?

But wait a minute, you might say. I’ve read about companies, even big companies, losing data in the cloud during a disaster.

It’s true, there have been times when the cloud failed companies. When this happened, it was because the data was only stored in one location. And it was based in the same region as the company. That’s an obvious mistake.

With the Microsoft cloud, you can get ‘geo-redundancy.’ This means that your data is in more than one location. So, if your area is hit with a hurricane, along with floods and electrical storms, your data would be safe in a datacenter across the country.

That also means that your company data is available even during the storm.

Steps to take

1. We’d love to meet you and discuss your plans for keeping your business running. If you’re ready right now, call us or send an email. We’re happy to set up a free consultation to review your plan.

call: 858-429-3000

email: sales@managedsolution.com

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New Windows 10 devices at CES, Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, summiting the highest peaks in 50 states (in under 50 days) – Weekend Reading: Jan. 6 edition

By Thomas Kohnstamm as written on blogs.microsoft.com

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Weekend Reading of 2017. We know many of you are still climbing your mountain of post-vacation emails or getting re-acquainted with commuting schedules, but please allow us to distract you with our top news from an exciting first week back in the office.

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