Decreasing Business Costs And Risks of IT Failure

IT systems are an integral part of every small and medium sized business.  For many owners and managers they are an area of business that they worry about partially because they don't readily understand the intricacies of computer networks and also because they hear horror stories about the impacts of a system failure.

 

 

In some ways the industry is part of the issue here as there are many articles which talk about what the negative impacts might be but often little information on how to avoid and improve the reliability and the recoverability of your IT network.  Here is some material which can help you plan better and improve your chances of reducing and avoiding such failures.

5 Key things to do to ensure better operation

1. Backup all critical data files daily.  That is everyday without fail.  The number of SMB businesses which fail to do this is astonishing.  According to Symantec SMB data only 23 percent of SMBs are backing up their data daily.  Fewer than 50 percent are doing so weekly.  There are a number of events which can lead to data loss so failing to do a backup can easily lead to problems.  Do it everyday!

2. Ensure backup procedures are checked regularly.  For those who are doing a regular backup just doing it is not really enough.  Many times it is thought that backups are okay but when the critical time comes to recover data it is found not to be done correctly.  Backups can become corrupt or key chunks can be missing.  Test that backups are done correctly on a frequent, scheduled basis.

3. Make sure updated anti virus protection and firewalls are enabled at all times.  Far too many companies have no anti virus software, expired software licenses, or disabled anti virus that is not running at all.  This makes your business technology vulnerable to viruses spread through email, spam, data downloads and other web sites.  Files corrupted by a virus will not only affect your business operations but could potentially be spread to customers and email contacts which will negatively affect your reputation.  Roughly 40 percent of small-to-medium sized businesses will have their network affected by a hacker.  Chances are that many of these businesses will not know they have been attacked.  Hackers look on line for open ports and then infiltrate whatever space they can with malicious code and files.  If this malicious code cannot be removed the hard drives could need to be reformatted to clean everything and files would be lost.  This is another reason why regular backups are important so a backup from prior to the code's insertion can be used.  Updating security patches and changing passwords upon departure of employees are further protections to hacking.

4. Monitor server drives.  Dangerously full server drives can bring a slew of issues, from server crashes to sluggish email.  Proactive server monitoring and maintenance can spare your business a lot of problems down the road.

5. Regularly check critical backup logs.  Very few IT technology problems emerge suddenly overnight.  They typically progress and worsen over time into a more serious problem.  Frequently  reviewing the critical built in logs in your systems can usually indicate something is amiss before it becomes a major problem and wrecks havoc on your business infrastructure.

There are many ways that your IT network can be managed.  It can be the responsibility of an internal employee who has some knowledge of IT.  It can be the responsibility of trained internal IT technical resource(s).  It can be a combination of these coupled with the assistance of an external IT service provider.  It can be a managed services program where the external provider provides a defined set of services including many of the items listed above.

Whatever structure you put in place there is a need to ensure that the responsibilities of the parties are defined so that each of the activities outlined are taken care of for your network.  Ensuring that these five key areas are covered will go a long way to decreasing the costs and risks of your company experiencing an IT failure.  Of course there is much more to running your network than just these five but they provide a good underpinning which can assist you to have a more solid infrastructure.

(function(){
var s='hubspotutk',r,c=((r=new RegExp('(^|; )'+s+'=([^;]*)').exec(document.cookie))?r[2]:''),w=window;w[s]=w[s]||c,
hsjs=document.createElement("script"),el=document.getElementById("hs-cta-b4579e98-1440-45fd-bc63-49a3b1ee5551");
hsjs.type = "text/javascript";hsjs.async = true;
hsjs.src = "//cta-service-cms2.hubspot.com/cs/loader.js?pg=b4579e98-1440-45fd-bc63-49a3b1ee5551&pid=245212&hsutk=" + encodeURIComponent(c);
(document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0]||document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]).appendChild(hsjs);
try{el.style.visibility="hidden";}catch(err){}
setTimeout(function() {try{el.style.visibility="visible";}catch(err){}}, 2500);
})();

(function(){
var s='hubspotutk',r,c=((r=new RegExp('(^|; )'+s+'=([^;]*)').exec(document.cookie))?r[2]:''),w=window;w[s]=w[s]||c,
hsjs=document.createElement("script"),el=document.getElementById("hs-cta-019f5aa4-5fe5-4173-8e27-4325cb71610d");
hsjs.type = "text/javascript";hsjs.async = true;
hsjs.src = "//cta-service-cms2.hubspot.com/cs/loader.js?pg=019f5aa4-5fe5-4173-8e27-4325cb71610d&pid=245212&hsutk=" + encodeURIComponent(c);
(document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0]||document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]).appendChild(hsjs);
try{el.style.visibility="hidden";}catch(err){}
setTimeout(function() {try{el.style.visibility="visible";}catch(err){}}, 2500);
})();