Preparedness
Small businesses will face many unknowns throughout the course of time, and may not always be able to be prepared for each one. They may be due to market trends, the local, state, and national economy, or other uncontrollable circumstances. There are however many factors that businesses can be fully prepared for.
One thing is certain, if your business interfaces with technology in any way, you can count on technology failure. The goal is that your business can be sustained through these events, whether great or small, and continue to operate with full functionality, commonly referred to as Business Continuity. With proper planning and technology in place, business owners need not fear these events or lose sleep at night over what if’s, but can fully trust this into the hands of SBT.
Learn more about:
Hardware Failure
Hardware failure is a fact of life that if properly planned for, doesn’t need to be a catastrophic event. Hard Drives, power supplies, motherboards, and other components are common failures that can be taken in stride. Being prepared for such events will minimize costs, downtime, and the impact on your clients’.
Ways to mitigate such occurrences include:
- Dual Power Supplies
- RAID Array’s
- Redundant Power Sources
- Failover Servers
- Image based backups
- Phone service failover
Loss of Internet Connectivity
As more and more services, data, and applications rely on the Internet (Cloud), internet connectivity is essential to business operations. Simple technology exists wherein your internet can be routed over a secondary or backup connection should your main provider have an outage. This is often required in medical practices, law firms, and other data critical environments.
You may want to consider:
- Redundant Internet/WAN (Wide Area Network) Service
- Redundant Router/Firewall Equipment
Business Continuity
Disasters will undoubtedly have a stunning impact on your business; they don’t however need to put you out of service for an extended period of time. With the availability of hosted facilities, cloud backup providers, hosted applications, or any internet connected location, business can be run from any physical location with minimal effort.
Plan For:
- Power Outages
- Loss of facilities due to fire, flood, and other natural disasters
Plan With:
- Full image backups (onsite and offsite)
- Application Failover Environment
- Hot or Cold Site (offsite facility to run operations from in the event of disaster)
Industry Compliance
Does your business process credit cards? If you’re like most small companies, it’s necessary to offer your clientele this form of payment. Did you know that by accepting credit cards, you become liable for their data under PCI Compliance regulations? If you’ve ever attempted this questionnaire, you know that it’s no easy road to becoming compliant. However there is hope, we have worked with many clients and helped them achieve this compliance status with minimal impact on day-to-day operations.
What about medical data or PHI (Patient Health Information)? Can you say with confidence that you are HIPPA compliant? You most likely cannot if you’ve not consulted with an IT professional and made many changes in your network infrastructure and policies.
In the rapidly changing world of industry compliance, let us help you decipher these confusing regulations to protect your client’s information.