Just 25 years ago the most important business tool was the telephone…not the sophisticated iPhone™ or Blackberry™, but POTS, the plain old telephone system. Combined with the Rolodex, it was a powerful tool that linked the business to the customer. Twenty-five years ago, and even today, AT&T and the “baby bells” were known for their reliability. The chance of the phone system going down was very slim. You definitely were not going to close the doors to your business for good if the phones were down for a period of time.
Today, the indispensible tool is the computer and the network to which it is connected. Together they facilitate communication with clients, manage complex business processes and maintain financial and client information. Unfortunately, an outage with computer systems or the network could easily force you to close your business for good. What would happen to your business if either one was unavailable for an extended period of time? Would you lose money? Would your company’s reputation suffer? Would your inability to supply your product or service damage another company’s reputation? Could you recover?
While all businesses need some level of disaster recovery planning, most small business owners have not given much thought to the possibility of a disaster! Wake up, small business owners! A disaster could be as small as spilling a drink on a critical server or your laptop or something as spectacular as Hurricane Katrina or a security attack. If the event keeps you from conducting business for an extended period of time, then you need a backup plan that answers the question: How do we conduct business if a critical resource is unavailable?
Think for a few moments about your business and consider these 3 questions:
1) Which processes are critical to your business? If these processes are unable to function, your business doesn’t function.
2) What are the technology components upon which these processes depend? Do you have a critical file, server, or other piece of hardware?
3) How long can your I.T. environment be unavailable to you or your customers before the business begins to suffer?
Answers to these three questions are the beginning of disaster planning. The next step is to begin to reduce or eliminate the risks that impact your business (the subject of another post).
Best wishes for your success!
Leslie Knight is a small business consultant with over 20 years of experience in Information Technology management in Fortune 500 companies. She applies her experience in Corporate America saving them millions to smaller entrepreneurial enterprises. She is also the author of Navigating the I.T. Minefield.
To download “When Disaster Strikes” from Navigating the I.T. Minefield: Straight Talk for the Small Enterprise, go to http://bit.ly/zAcdl. Yes, I require your email address…but that’s to keep the spam bots from taking over. Good people won’t abuse the content J
Hello, your website has a lot of useful information for the every day reader. Thank you and keep up the posts.