3 Strategies to Help Minimize the Effect of Server and Network Downtime

3 strategies to help minimize the effect of server and network downtime

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Server and network downtime can cost businesses thousands of dollars. Each time a server or network goes down, your company data is at risk. There are a lot of reasons for downtime, like power issues for example. Although issues such as hardware failures, human error, and power outages are out of your control, you can control how downtime affects your business. Below are three strategies to help minimize the effects of server and network downtime.

Have a Business Continuity Plan

A continuity plan is a plan that helps your business continue to operate should a disaster occur. You can design your plan to deal with both short-term and long-term disasters. It is essential to test your plan regularly to see how reliable it is in a crisis. Update your plan accordingly when it needs improvements.

Create a Disaster Recovery Plan

When a disaster occurs that affects your data, it is important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. This plan consists of a data backup solution which can reside on local storage or cloud storage. Cloud storage is a more convenient and flexible solution. Unlike local storage, cloud storage doesn’t require a secondary backup location. Perform backups of your data on a regular basis. Nightly and weekly backups are often the best strategy.

Test Your Plans

Testing your data backup and recovery plan is essential to help minimize downtime. Regular testing will reveal areas that need improvement, whether it is hardware, software, or human error. You want to ensure your data recovery time is short.

These three strategies are a great way to help protect your company data during a disaster. In order to create well thought out plans and choose the best solutions for your business, it is best to consult with a managed service provider experienced in data disaster recovery.

 

Contact us today to schedule a consultation. We provide services and solutions that can prevent or help you recover from the next disaster.

What Does a Typical Contingency Plan Outline Look Like?

what does a typical contingency plan outline look like

Part of running a modern business is planning for the quick recovery of your business’ computer processes in the event of an emergency. In the past, when the computers went down, they just went down.

According to this article, organizations create contingency plans, sometimes called a “Plan B,” to prepare for something bad that could affect the organization’s ability to function. Developing an effective contingency plan is essential for any organization.

Having a system in place to restore them immediately was unheard of for small and medium-sized businesses; and even for many large corporations. Professionals mainly used computers to run programs like Excel or Word. They managed files in certain ways and receptionists played Solitaire. However, as we all know, times have changed.

Now our global business culture is somewhat reliant on technology for many things like:

  • Communication
  • Marketing
  • Customer relationship management
  • Online and offline reputation management
  • File storage
  • Business processes

Because of this, it’s now crucial to back up your entire computer system and have protocols in place, so that your business can continue to run smoothly even when your systems are down.

Having a good contingency plan in place will ensure that business interruption, data loss, and productivity loss are minimal across all the devices that your company uses.

This could include your company:

  • Desktops and laptops
  • Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets
  • Peripherals like printers and all-in-one fax machines
  • Servers
  • Websites
  • Computer networks
  • Mainframes
  • Distributed systems

Depending on the size of your business and your standard operating procedures, some contingency plans might include:

Having to relocate your primary business and IT systems temporarily to an alternate site, using alternate equipment, or having your IT team reset some systems manually to get them working properly again

Here’s a Typical Contingency Plan Outline

1. State your goals – In the event of a power outage, drive failure or even an extreme condition like fire or water damage, what goals must your contingency plan meet for your business to remain efficient and operational?

2. Define the impact on your business – How much downtime can your business really handle? Some businesses can handle 7 days, while others can only handle 3 hours. What type of overall impact financially and professionally would an outage and downtime cause? What is the scope of varying degrees?

Though this may seem like redundant step, it’s not. Yes, “it would be bad,” is an answer that could apply to any negative situation. However, you might not realize that certain departments can handle much less downtime than you realized and some might not need much investment in contingency planning.

3. Once you’ve identified your goals and the potential impacts on your business, decide what preventive steps you can take to minimize problems; so you don’t have so much to fix during an outage – This could mean using certain types of backup, cloud servers located in other states and taking other simple measures that will mean certain parts of your business wouldn’t even need resetting or restoration.

4. Next identify your list of go-to recovery strategies – You should have a list of recovery strategies to implement immediately when something happens. You should have strategies appropriate for both small and extreme emergencies.

5. Next, take time to test your plan and train your staff – Every contingency plan is different, so just like a fire drill, your company staff and IT staff should understand how your plan will work.

6. Ensure that you’re taking the proper maintenance steps daily, weekly etc.

Should your IT team routinely check servers?
Does any software or equipment need biannual upgrading?
Do you have any new staff you need to train on how to properly backup their work or behave in an emergency situation?

Contact Us

We understand that contingency planning is just as much a part of modern businesses as smartphones and color printers. We understand how to make the restoration process simple for businesses, yet effective in the case of an emergency.

Training Employees for Disaster Recovery

it consulting in south florida training employees for disaster recovery

IT Consulting in South Florida Disaster recovery plays a major role in IT consulting. Most businesses understand that business downtime is costly, but not all of them know how to create and execute a disaster recovery strategy.

According to this article, good business continuity plans will keep your company up and running through interruptions of any kind: power failures, IT system crashes, natural disasters, supply chain problems and more

Technology is just one aspect of disaster recovery. It’s great if you back your data up in the cloud, but you also need to know how to recover it.

Even if you practice data backup, you can fail at disaster recovery if you didn’t train your employees. According to a recent Tech Republic article, you should establish a communication protocol to keep employees informed in the case of a disaster:

“Working directly with your IT staff on disaster communication protocol goes hand in hand with the rule set of the communication tree. In a disaster, staff has a tendency to be nervous, so it’s natural for a staffer in the accounting department to just call a junior staff member in IT networking he has lunch with to “get the latest.” This is where rumors start that can be damaging to the company, both internally and externally.”

Here are three things you can do to establish a communication protocol:

Create a strategy

It all starts with your recovery strategy. In your plan, you need to outline how exactly employees will communicate with management.

Train employees

Once your strategy is finished, you can start training employees. The important thing is that each individual knows what he or she is supposed to do.

Follow up

After you train employees, you should follow up with them from time to time. If you don’t, then employees will just forget what they learned during training.

By mentioning disaster recovery from time to time, you’ll make sure that employees remember their training. This way, they’ll know what to do when disaster strikes.

To talk more about IT consulting in South Florida, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks.

IT Consulting in South Florida: Why Migration is the Hardest Aspect of Office 365

it consulting in south florida why migration is the hardest aspect of office 365 2

IT Consulting in South Florida
An important aspect of IT consulting is incorporating new programs and applications in your operations. Office 365 has been great so far in terms of increasing business productivity. It seems like the biggest problem businesses have had so far is migrating to the cloud. Once that’s set up, they have no trouble at all as far as adjusting to the hosted applications goes.

According to this article, migrating to Office 365 is becoming increasingly popular among businesses both large and small. The upside of moving from an on-premises environment to one hosted online by Microsoft offers compelling benefits.

There’s a reason migrating is the hardest part. Most business owners don’t have experience with cloud applications. Although they function like Windows program for the most part, setting them up is a different story.

For that reason, many businesses seek professional help to set their hosted applications up. According to a recent Info World article, this is particularly common with Office 365’s cloud Exchange:

“Office 365 has been touted as Microsoft’s fastest growing business ever. Still, some organizations are stalling when it comes to moving mailboxes from on-premises Exchange to Office 365’s cloud Exchange. What’s the holdup? For some, the need to plan and execute the transition may be competing with other day-to-day issues, delaying the Office 365 Exchange migration.”

Exchange is perhaps Microsoft’s most important program for businesses. But because they rely on email so much, they’re hesitant to migrate to the new hosted Exchange.

Here’s the good news: after the migration is over, your business productivity will increase. Employees will have access to the hosted Exchange from remote locations. The standard benefits of cloud computing also apply to hosted Exchange in this context.

The important thing is that you get the migration right. If you mess with the settings and employees aren’t able to send outgoing emails, then your productivity will take a hit. You can avoid this problem altogether by working with a professional IT agency. In this case, you’ll know that you’re starting off on the right foot regarding Office 365.

To talk more about IT consulting in South Florida, or anything else, please contact us.

Network Technicians Expected on More Budgets

computer network technicians expected to be on more company budgets

The thought of hiring a computer network technician might sound like someone working in-house in your company where availability is only limited to work days. Unfortunately, network problems seem to always happen at the worst possible times when your IT crew isn’t available. What happens if a problem arises when you’re working overtime on a project on a weekend, or even a holiday?

It’s better to have a network technician working internally or available on call whenever you need them. A computer network technician is an IT professional employed by a business entity to help with the creation, maintenance, and troubleshooting of present and future computer network hardware and software products, in support of business operations. That’s something we provide for you here at 4 Corner IT. But have you thought about including network management in your budget for this year after neglecting it for far too long?

A new poll from Forrester recently showed that 40% of companies polled are placing network management into their budget through 2015. This shouldn’t surprise you when you see how vulnerable networks now are in wake of what we’ve seen happening around the country. The Sony Pictures hack alone shows how a network is easily brought down to a point of crippling the ability to access any data.

On the other end of the spectrum is hacking on network lines without companies even realizing it’s happening. With so much of this happening unknowingly around the world, the danger exists of company data or even trade secrets being stolen. With proper monitoring, however, and technical assistance available at all times, this doesn’t have to happen.

Using our service, you’ll feel confident knowing we’re preventing online thieves from invading your network while making your business run more efficiently. You don’t have to worry about network slowdowns either, in addition to gaining tips on how to improve things along the way. As IT consultants, we have real-world experience to what’s really going on in the IT world today.

Contact us here at 4 Corner IT to find out more about how our network technicians work and how they’ll help you avoid being a new business statistic in online theft or downtime.