Organizations must evaluate their IT systems and identify the devices or services that could bring your internal workflows to a grinding halt.
Every organization is different, therefore a system breakdown can impact a business in a variety of different ways. For most small businesses, any type of system outage can be costly. For problems that require extensive downtime, your business could go into crisis mode.
Small businesses must become proactive in their approach to resolving system breakdowns. The best way to avert an IT crisis is to take measures that protect your systems from complete failure.
Here’s a few tips that every business should consider when deploying IT infrastructure.
Create a Disaster Recovery Plan
A disaster recovery plan should cover the core services in your business and detail the actions that your IT staff will perform in order to restore connectivity to its critical services.
For example, if you have a server that encounters a failure, your disaster recovery plan could include a guide that instructs your IT staff on how to restore the server from a backup onto a standby server.
There is no one size fits all approach to disaster recovery. Each business will need to evaluate their major points of failure and devise a plan to keep your systems running during an IT crisis.
Identify Your Company’s Most Valuable Employees
Do you have a vice president or a CEO that makes decisions that crucial to your small business? What if one of your most valuable employees has a presentation in an hour and their laptop has stop working?
Does your company have a rapid remediation plan for this type of situation? More importantly, who would call during a crisis like this? If the executive is unable to give the presentation, your company could potentially lose out on a new client.
Consider these types of scenarios when outfitting your most valuable employees with laptops and desktop PCs. In some instances, it might make sense to have to machines on standby that can be used in the event of a laptop or desktop PC failure.
From there, your IT staff could restore the files needed onto the new laptop and executive could proceed with the presentation.
Common Causes of a Complete System Breakdown
IT departments should continuously audit their networks and search for potential points of failure. In every organization, these points will be unique to the infrastructure and applications that are used in the day to day operations.
That’s why it’s a great idea to bring in an IT consultant that can help you navigate some of the potential failures that are unique to your network. Here is a list of common IT problems that will cause an organization to suffer a complete system breakdown.
- Bad UPS batteries
- Hard drive failures
- Switch failures
- Ransomware
- Internet interruptions
- Faulty equipment
- Telephony problems
- Email issues
This is just the tip of the iceberg. When your business can identify its major points of failure, your IT staff can put together a remediation plan that will help your enterprise quickly recover.
Regularly Test Your Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Plans
Organizations must regularly test their disaster recovery and business continuity plans in order to feel confident about their downtime mitigation processes.
Your organization must consider various scenarios where data and equipment may not be accessible. Having your data properly backed up is a key tenant of disaster recovery and business continuity.
After all, businesses can always replace IT equipment. They aren’t always able to replace data. That’s why it is important to ensure that your business is utilizing the best practices in backing up its critical data.
Bring in an IT Consultant to Help
There’s an old saying in IT that probably rings true for various other industries: “You only know what you know.”
Market research conducted by Accenture says that more businesses will continue to seek the help of IT consultants to help achieve maximum uptime and system reliability.
Bringing in an IT consultant to help you review your disaster recovery and business continuity procedures will help you discover potential problems that you may have missed when performing your initial IT risk assessment.
As your IT consultant, we can use our experience in various different industries in order to provide your business with a customized plan to help it recover from an IT crisis.
