How long can you afford to be without your computer systems, and what would that mean for your business? Could you survive?
We are hearing a lot in the news right now about natural disasters such as tornados and hurricanes. It happens every year. And, while I want you to be prepared for those types of disasters as well, most of us will never experience something like that in our business.
However, that doesn’t mean that you won’t face some sort of ‘computer disaster’ that grinds your business to a halt. As a matter of fact, most businesses experience some type of computer failure at some point. Most of these tend to be hardware or software failures. Others are usually things like building fires, floods, electrical issues, or power failures. All these, however, have one thing in common. They shut down your servers, computers, and network and leave you without the tools you need to run your business.
In nearly every Business and Technology Assessments that we perform for someone, we find that their backups are non-existent or haven’t run in so long that if there were a failure, they would be out weeks and even months’ worth of work. Ponder the thought of having to redo the entire last months’ worth of work.
Even if your backup is working, it may take 24-48 hours (or more) to get you back up and running, especially if we need to order replacement parts and then restore your system from backup. I go into more detail about this in my free report “The Horrifying Truth about How Your Current Backup Solution Will Let You Down!”
So, what do you, as a small business, need to do? First, have a plan. It doesn’t have to be a complex plan, but you need to sit down and really give some thought as to what you could, and couldn’t do in your business without your server, or Internet, or main business application. Is there an alternative, such as switching temporarily back to paper forms?
Make a plan of action. What is your process for continuing to do business while you wait for systems to be restored. This is what we call Business Continuity. How do you keep going, or get back to normal operation the quickest, in the case of a problem?
Put redundancies and systems in place to keep the things you really need to keep running your business going, and determine what you can live without for a while. In the IT industry, we are all about redundancy. If your email goes down, is there another way to access it? Do you rely so heavily on the Internet that you should consider investing in a second Internet provider? Does your backup take complete snapshots of your servers so that they can be spun up on virtual machines (or in the Cloud) quickly? Are your backups even going offsite?
Let me leave you with a final comment about keeping your business running. Most small business owners don’t know what they don’t know, at least when it comes to their IT. In today’s connected world, more things are dependent on each other than ever before. Our software and phone systems may be dependent on an Internet connection, for example. It’s important to create a disaster plan with the assistance of your staff and your IT professional, all working together to plan, document, and understand what must be in place to keep your business running, and return it to normal operations as quickly as possible.