Prepare your Business for “The Big Storm”
By Edward McKenna, Project Manager
How safe is your infrastructure when a large weather event is forecasted? Do you have a proper disaster recovery plan to mitigate everything from small morning power outage to a flood? For most, having a server in the cloud reduces some of the inherent challenges but what about your onsite desktops, laptops and printers? Protecting your physical infrastructure and data can be achieved with a solid, well thought out disaster recovery plan. Maintaining continuity of operations ensures that your business-critical systems and data remain intact and can effectively resume after a weather event.
A weather maker is fast approaching, do I have a disaster recovery plan? The role of a managed service provider is to protect your physical technology, systems and data. A proper data backup can eliminate a single point of failure of your primary data where vital applications are saved data and housed. With data being saved locally, on a separate medium and backed up to the cloud, you can have peace of mind that data can be easily accessed during and after an event. What vital business applications and operations will be impacted? Prioritize these services and work with your MSP to understand restoration times and impact.
At a physical technology level, does your IT server room have environmental detection sensors to monitor for excessive heat and moisture? These sensors can be installed and set to monitor 24/7 alerting you and your MSP where every second counts. Uninterrupted power supplies for both your server and laptop/workstations will protect against damaging high voltage spikes from a lightning strike to brownout conditions where the power supplied goes below 115 volts. If your office is in an area prone to flooding, are your systems positioned high enough off the ground? Have you compiled and updated a full technology inventory for desktops, laptops, servers and printers?
How will your employees’ function during a prolonged weather occurrence? Be it a monster snowstorm, a hurricane or tornado, weather events can and often do sideline businesses when employees are forced to work remotely. The time to practice for an event is before it happens. Start with a bad weather plan for each type of weather situation. Train your staff on who is responsible for what functions during storm. A well-defined communication plan, with specific contacts, will help keep the team together and functioning during these incidents.
Work with your managed service provider during your partner reviews to fully understand how your backup and disaster recovery solutions are their benefits to your organization. Proactively planning for these types of scenarios will optimize your recovery and help to deliver a successful outcome.