Be Proactive: You Need a Plan for Disruption 

This is the first in our series of articles in which we examine how taking a proactive approach to your technology – and your business in general – makes your organization more secure, more sustainable, and more profitable.  

Technology is essential to the operation of your business. If your technology goes down, so does your business’ productivity and profitability. Downtime impacts both a business’ bottom line and reputation. Planning for disruption means taking all possible steps to minimize the impact of an IT outage on your business.  

Natural disasters, like hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and floods, or human errors, such as user mistakes, hackers, and aging servers, could cause a system failure and take your business offline for hours, days or weeks. Not to mention the potential of critical data loss.  

And that’s why you must have a plan in place to deal with disruptions – before they occur. Otherwise, you’re probably going to have a disaster on your hands.   

Here’s how to begin planning:  

• First, think through the types of disruptions – natural disasters, cyberattacks, rogue employees, etc – that are possible for your business. You need a plan to deal with each and every one of them.  
• Think through your recovery needs and objectives. How much data can you afford to lose? And how long can you afford for your systems to be offline in the event of a disaster? An hour? A day? A week?  
• Be prepared with an active and effective business continuity plan that allows you to continue business operations as close to normal in the event of a disruption. This includes working with experts who understand your business model when creating a BCP. 
• Ensure proper backup systems are in place and that those backups are stored at an off-site location. We follow the “3-2-1-1-0” principle because backups are mission critical to your business continuity. 
• Test and monitor backups – make sure everything is working just the way it should rather than assuming availability when you need it. 
• Create an incident response plan so that everyone understands what to do in the event of a security breach.  
• Conduct regular incident response exercises with all contributors to the incident response plan. 
• Put in place proven systems, processes, procedures, and checklists, so that your team understands their roles in the event of a disaster. The details matter. 
• Evaluate your risks and consider cyber insurance for those that cannot be adequately mitigated otherwise. 
• Know what support to expect in the event of a disruption: At Proactive we are proud of our 30-minute or less guaranteed response time for critical issues under our Managed IT plans. 

Proactive IT’s technology disaster recovery services ensure that, should disaster strike, your business can get back up and running quickly, with little to no loss of data or IT services. Being proactive is our key differentiator. That means thinking strategically and using the proper tools to support your operations, your growth, and your profitability.    

If you’d like to have a conversation about your organization’s plan for business continuity, please reach out to us via email at info@weareproactive.com or 704-464-3075 extension 3.   

Dedicated to IT security and productivity,   

– Steve