Can You Really Afford Not to Have a Backup Plan?

According to Symantec SMB, 50% of SMBs admit to having no backup and disaster recovery plan in place. 41% of those surveyed confessed that they had never even given much thought to implementing a disaster recovery or business continuity plan. If you are one of them, then you really need to think about whether you can afford the status quo. Answering these questions will help you decide.

1. How often is employee productivity and customer accessibility or service stalled each day from a downed network or system?

2. How much downtime can your business truly afford and what kind of backup or recovery solutions are in effect when systems are unavailable?

3. What level of IT support can be accessed? Can it be accessed quickly enough to minimize damage? Are you confident that your business can either be back online or be able to access lost data with minimal disruption, no matter what?

4. Is your most critical data frequently backed up? Is the data on the personal laptops, iPads or Blackberrys of employees backed up? Are all backups stored in a location off-site and quickly accessible in the event of theft, fire or flooding? Are you using any custom installed software and is the supplier still in business should this software need to be re-installed or updated? Are account details, licensing agreements, and security settings somewhere on record, and is it duplicated off-site?

5. Are your systems truly protected from theft, hackers, and viruses? Are passwords to sensitive data changed whenever employees leave the company or business unit?

6. When was the last time you tested backup processes to ensure they are working properly? How quick were your back ups?

Answering these questions will help you understand if you are needlessly bleeding money every day by subjecting your business to the high hourly rates, service charges, trip fees and wait times of on-call IT support. If you are an SMB, you don’t have to fear technology failure. A trusted MSP can help you resolve these challenges in a more effective and efficient manner.

Comments

Has Your Website Been Optimized for Mobile Users?

Did you know that this year there will be more mobile web surfers than stationary ones? That means more prospects are accessing your business website more through their smart phones, tablets or other mobile devices than with a laptop or PC. If you thought you had time to make the switch this year, you may want to reconsider in light of new research. A recent study revealed that around 40% of prospects move on to a competitor if they have a poor mobile experience. How prepared is your business for this change? Well, if you are just starting out, the following checklist will help... 1. Make sure your mobile site is different from your regular website - While you must stick to your branding standards, your mobile website should be simpler than your web version. The reason being is that complicated designs that load well and look good on computers are often distorted when accessed through a mobile device. Plus, mobile surfers don’t really have the time to sift through a lot of conte

Four ways unified communications can improve productivity Part II

Four ways unified communications can improve productivity Part II In our last blog we suggested that unified communications has value to an organization's efforts to increase productivity. It can facilitate smoother, more efficient collaboration in a 24/7 workspace. Unified communications can Improve the functionality of our 24/7 workplace - The reality of 24/7 availability has been around for a while, and learning to place constraints on that is for another e-guide. However, unified communications can play a role on the 24/7 expectation problem. For one thing, with a single portal to an individual’s multiple communication channels, an employee can more easily communicate across those channels that they are not available and therefore limit expectations for an immediate or timely response when that is not possible. Also, with a unified portal, responding to different channels in off times can be easier and therefore less time-intrusive. Improve client satisfaction - Nothin

The contact center and omni-channel communications

The contact center and omni-channel communications We’ve talked in other blogs about the value of contact centers over traditional, one - dimensional call centers, but we haven't talked yet about the need for contact centers to be designed on the omni-channel model. This blog explains what omni-channel means and why this is a critical part of the contact center design. Omni-channel refers to a specific model of multi-channel communications. We already know a contact center makes use of many different modes of communications in order to best meet all of your customers wherever they choose to be. But we haven’t talked about the fact that contact centers need to be omni-channel. In the omni-channel model, all of the channels are integrated. The idea here is to allow for cross channel “communication” so that the information and customer data that is accumulated on one channel is immediately communicated to all the other extant channels. The goal: whenever a customer connects on a

OptiNet Blog