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What happens if your business productivity comes to a grinding halt?For every hour of downtime, your company loses money and, sometimes, its reputation.How would you minimize the downtime to come back online? How could you prevent this from happening in the future? You can minimize IT downtime by building IT resilience.WEBIT Services has helped hundreds of clients create IT strategies and prepare against IT interruptions for over 25 years.By reading this article, you will learn what IT resilience means, why it's important, how to check if your business has it, and what you can do to build and improve IT resilience.
IT resilience means your business can keep running even when things go wrong with your IT hardware, software, or system.You may build resilience through data backups, IT continuity, backup hardware and systems, and proper IT disaster and recovery planning.
It keeps your vital information safe so you don't lose it. When data is damaged or lost, your only options are to restore it from backups or recreate it by hand. If that's not possible, that data is lost forever.
When your business runs smoothly or responds well in a crisis, it builds customer trust. On the other hand, IT disasters can break down customer trust and your reputation, particularly if customer data is compromised.
Some businesses need IT resilience to follow the IT compliance standards set by their industry. For example, in healthcare, IT compliance will dictate how patient records are stored, how they are backed up, and how long they are kept.
Do you have a good plan for backing up your mission-critical data? Is it regularly tested? How will it be restored in a crisis? Do you have an IT recovery plan for when an IT disaster occurs?
Do you have extra hardware or tools ready if your main hardware breaks?For example, if one firewall goes out, do you have a secondary firewall ready to take over? Do you have a backup server prepared if your main server crashes?Having secondary hardware on hand helps minimize downtime. Otherwise, you must wait until new hardware is purchased, shipped, programmed, and installed, which can take days, weeks, or even months, depending on supply chains and the complexity of the hardware.
Do you know what to do if your IT system is taken out? How do you respond? How do you get your system and business back up and running?IT disaster recovery planning is not just a good practice; it's a necessity. Imagine a scenario where your IT systems are down, your data is lost, and you can't communicate with your employees or customers. It's a nightmare.That's where a well-thought-out IT disaster recovery plan comes into play.IT resilience is part of your IT disaster recovery planning. It focuses on maintaining your system and bringing it back online as quickly as possible in a crisis.
When disaster strikes, do you know what to do? Do you know who to contact or what systems are most important for your business functionality? How will you reach customers or get those systems back online?Answering these questions will help you build an effective IT incidence response plan and, therefore, build your IT resilience.
Backup and recovery systems safely store data from a designated timeframe if data is erased or compromised. It's a safeguard against total data loss, preventing severe financial loss.A data backup is a copy of your digital information stored securely in a separate location from your original data. The primary purpose of backups is to ensure that your data remains accessible and intact even in the face of an IT disaster.Protecting your data builds IT resilience.
If possible, invest in duplicates of your most important hardware. This way, the backup hardware can take over if the main hardware goes offline or crashes.However, hardware can be expensive. It's best to talk to your IT provider or internal IT team to determine the most critical technology for your IT system and how a secondary piece may fit into your IT budget and IT roadmap.
You can't build IT resilience without understanding or practicing proper IT security. When it comes to security, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This means regularly evaluating your system and practices for security weaknesses and searching for improvements.Quarterly risk assessments can help you find risks and vulnerabilities and find possible solutions, security tools, or new security practices. Employees should also know about good security habits and receive relevant cybersecurity training.
If your incident response plan is only a theory, are you sure it will work in a crisis? True IT resilience has an effective, tested IT incident response plan—you know exactly what will work, how, and how quickly when faced with an IT disaster.Evaluate, update, and test your plan annually. Has your plan been adjusted for new hardware or software? Are the listed contacts the same, or must they be updated? Are you storing data the same way as when the plan was created? Have any of your critical systems or functions changed?Talk to your IT provider or internal IT team about your current IT incident response plan and when it was last tested.
IT resilience helps minimize IT downtime and maintain your business's functionality, even when faced with an IT disaster. Remember, preparation is critical, and a well-thought-out plan can be the difference between a minor disruption and a major crisis.There are many ways to build IT resilience, but some key attributes include:
To evaluate your current IT resiliency, talk to your IT provider or internal IT team about your most recent risk assessment. What vulnerabilities were discovered? What hardware is most at risk for failure or needing replacement or duplicate? Are data backups in place and regularly tested?If you're unsure whether you have incident response plans, ask your provider, "Do we have plans, and are these aligned with real, plausible risks?"If you do have plans, when was the last time you were tested, and what were the results? Incident response plans should be tested at least annually to ensure they achieve the desired outcomes.If you don't have an incident response plan, a ransomware response plan is a good place to start. From there, you and your provider can reflect on other needs or risks your company may encounter.If your IT provider cannot answer these questions adequately, this is a service red flag that may indicate the need for a new IT provider.WEBIT Services has been performing risk assessments, creating incident response plans, and enacting IT strategies for satisfied clients for over 25 years.If you're looking for a new IT provider, book a free 30-minute assessment to see how WEBIT services can help.If you're not ready to make a commitment but would like to learn more about IT incident response plans, we recommend the following articles:
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