One of the most essential aspects of IT managed services consulting is the planning process. Once your organization has established a strategy for streamlining and optimizing your processes, you need to plan for the unexpected. In the 1980’s, the term “disaster recovery” came into vogue, as organizations began to realize the need to have redundancy in their IT capability. At that time, IT was a fairly isolated part of the business. Given how integrated that IT has become to all business processes, the concept has gradually morphed into “business continuity“. A business continuity plan addresses the plan of action should a company experience a disaster – whether it be a hurricane, a fire, or an internet interruption.
Those involved in business continuity planning must consider every possible scenario, from an employee mistake to a regional weather disruption. Because it only takes one event to shut down all of your IT operations, companies need to put contingencies in place. Managed services providers are tasked to stay on top of operations and provide a guarantee of business continuity for their customers.
What Exactly is Business Continuity?
Downtime is very costly to a business. Each minute of unexpected downtime has financial value attached to it so planning helps to avert a large monetary hit. Business Continuity Planning utilizes risk assessment and risk management to identify and evaluate the most significant potential threats to your day-to-day operations.
After identifying your most essential business functions, a plan is established to ensure those systems stay operational in the event of a disruptive situation. Ever since the pandemic showed up, there has been a marked increase in remote work. Although many employees enjoy the benefits of a more flexible work-life balance, the addition of all the remote technology and personnel has become a logistical cybersecurity nightmare.
For instance, the healthcare sector has been greatly affected. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) “Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO has seen a dramatic increase in the number of cyber attacks directed at its staff, and email scams targeting the public at large.”
WHO experienced a critical attack in which 450 active WHO email addresses and passwords were leaked online belonging to those working on the COVID response. This issue didn’t put the WHO’s systems at risk, because the data was not up-to-date. However, the cyberattack did affect a legacy extranet system, utilized by current and retired staff and partners. After the attack occurred, the WHO migrated the affected systems to a more secure authentication system.
Disaster Recovery Planning
Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning, or BDR, includes strategies for recovery that guarantee that your data storage devices are consistently functional. BDR also ensures that the proper backups and copies are in place. Remember, the more redundancy the better. For instance, your data may be onsite, backed up in the cloud, and on a redundant remote server.
Having adequate redundancy ensures there will always be a copy of your important data – even if you suffer a ransomware attack and criminals have locked your servers up. Your data is essential to your operation, making continuity planning a necessity.
Think about all the efforts you have dedicated to the continuity of your business so far. Imagine then, that your data goes offline simply because an employee clicked a malicious link. The click wasn’t intentional nor malicious, but could be devastating for your business.
Consulting and planning services not only afford your company protection against downtime, you’ll have a team of people who are dedicated to the success of your business. Unlike hiring an outside contractor to respond to one-time issues, an MSP operates as part of your team.
If you’d like more information about IT Consulting, Business Continuity Planning and managed services, call Alliance IT today.
