Prepare Your Business for Summer Disasters: 3 Ways to Weather the Storm

With the arrival of summer, we traditionally think barbeques, ice cream, and afternoons by the water, not power outages, hurricanes, and floods. However, from a business perspective, these are the realities for which you need to be prepared, as weather can seriously impact your bottom line.

While hurricanes and floods can damage business property, increased temperatures can lead to increased costs due to constant cooling and air conditioner servicing. Server rooms can overheat, the Internet can go down, and you could suffer from downtime. Is your business positioned with multiple recovery points and a plan for when you experience these disasters?

Don't Get Buffaloed: Prepare your Business for Winter Weather Disasters

According to the Institute for Business and Home Safety, an estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster. The unpredictability and destructive nature of winter weather, as seen in Buffalo last week, makes it vital to ensure your IT infrastructure is ready to face disaster head-on. Preparing your IT environment for winter weather will not only safeguard your network from these possible disasters – it will also improve your overall IT infrastructure. Here are the top 4 tips on preparing your IT infrastructure for winter weather:

Is Your Business Prepared for Disaster?

Disasters can come in all shapes and sizes at any given moment. Floods, fires and other natural emergencies can disable entire buildings and bring down a company’s entire IT infrastructure for days or even weeks. This loss of time and making crucial data unavailable and perhaps even vulnerable - like customer files and financial records - can lead to damages that a small to medium-sized business may never recover from. Without at the very least safely secured and tested backups, even a nefarious event such as a burglary might result in a fatal loss of digital information.

Lessons in the Storm: Disaster Recovery

In the wake of hurricane Sandy, the Eastern Seaboard’s tech sector has begun a return to normalcy. Not only did it fare in many cases better than expected but thanks to social media, relief efforts were bolstered and more volunteers mobilized than in other recent disasters. Lessons emerged as well, ways to improve response and more effectively guard against the unexpected.

What’s Threatening Your Businesses Technology?

IT threats can cause considerable damage, if not destroy, a business. A recent study discovered that, of companies experiencing a “major loss” of computer records, 43 percent never reopened, 51 percent closed within two years of the loss, and a mere 6 percent survived over the long-term.

Tips For Protecting your Systems in The Summer

As the summer heat continues to rise, following simple steps can help keep your technology cool and operational - without having to pay excessive utility bills.

Disaster Recovery Planning for SMBs

According to a recent Symantec study, one in two small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have no disaster recovery (DR) plan in place in the event of a network outage, loss of data or other IT disaster. SMBs are putting themselves at risk of losing their businesses if they have not designed a plan to protect their data (emails, accounting data, patient and client files, company records, legal records and other important documents and information).

Representatives from all departments in a business should be involved in the development of a plan to ensure all critical systems and processes can recover from any possible data loss activity.

Here are tips on what is needed in a DR “tool kit” to help minimize a disaster’s impact on a business’ IT assets:

Top Cloud Computing Benefits for SMBs

Cloud computing offers many services to businesses including infrastructure, applications, and/or storage space, all for a nominal fee. This is extremely beneficial to the many small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) investigating making the move to the cloud.

Like any business, SMBs want to keep costs under control. They are not looking to purchase additional infrastructure, servers, application programs and operation systems for use at their own premises. That’s where the cloud comes into the picture. Cloud hosting enables a business to run its websites or any other computing service on one or more virtual servers, making cloud hosting an extremely popular and valuable service.

Cloud computing is an on-demand subscription model, enabling on-demand access to reliable and configurable resources that can be quickly provisioned and released. An SMB pays only for the resources it uses making cloud computing a huge advantage.

Top cloud computing benefits for SMBs include:

The Case for Online Backup

IT service providers are responsible for many tasks. One of the most important ones is backing up an organization’s valuable data. No business wants to lose any critical information, so it is the responsibility for the technical engineer to determine which of the three methods for backing up data -- tape, disk and the Internet -- is the optimal solution for an organization.