How A Managed IT Service Provider is a Smart Move for Your Business

If the worst happened, could your business survive? Do you have a plan for ransomware attacks, fire, power outages, or natural disasters? If not, it might be time to hire a managed IT service provider.

In a perfect world, we’d be able to avoid these types of events completely. While that’s impossible, taking the proper precautions can be the key to your business’s continued success.

Working with a managed IT service provider is a smart business move to ensure you’re ready for anything. IT managed support can help you develop and implement an effective plan for backup and disaster recovery that will:

• Give you peace of mind.
• Ensure the continuity of your business no matter what happens.
• Protect and secure your crucial data.

A disaster event can mean a significant cost to your business in the form of employee downtime, lost data, increased liability, and more.

Natural disasters and online threats are a reality in today’s business world. Data shows that in the first half of 2021, more than 1,000 organizations were hit with ransomware attacks. And any business can be a target, even small ones. The threats to the continuity of your business are real, but working with a managed IT company to develop an effective IT disaster recovery plan can enable your business to recover with limited disruption.

How Planning for the Worst Will Protect Your Business

A managed IT company will prepare your business’s technology for when the worst happens. Disaster recovery is all about planning for the worst, so if it does happen, it can be managed.

According to Naim Kapucu, Pegasus Professor and director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida (UCF), “Leadership in managing crises can minimize the damage imposed by an incident while lack of effective leadership worsens the impact.”

A managed IT service provider can take the guesswork out of protecting your business. Any disaster prevention strategy and recovery plan should be tailored to your business’s unique needs.

An effective, proactive plan will often include these features:

Onsite Backups and Cloud Backup

There are two types of backup solutions: onsite and cloud-based.

Onsite backups give you full control over how your data is backed up and stored. In addition, this method is a fast way to back up and retrieve your data since it’s in onsite storage. If using an onsite backup, ongoing maintenance is required. Your managed IT service provider should monitor your backup jobs for failures, rotate and maintain your drives, and secure the media. Onsite backups will require more hands-on attention than a cloud-based solution. If you have an onsite backup you still need to ensure you have a backup stored offsite in case of fire or natural disaster.

Another backup solution is a cloud backup, which allows you to get back to normal operations by fully restoring lost files after a system failure or power loss. Unlike other backup methods, cloud backups are replicated across multiple data centers, ensuring reliability should you need access to the backup. Cloud backups are also scalable, so no matter how fast your data storage needs grow, the backup solution can grow alongside them.

Read a comparison of cloud backups versus onsite backups here.

Redundant Infrastructure

Offsite backups are copies of the operating system, applications, and data. With a redundant infrastructure, your entire server environment is available offsite, ready, and waiting to be called on. Redundant servers are backup copies of your servers, and the backups are never more than 24-hours old. If there is a system failure, a managed IT service provider can get your business back online and running quickly.

Documented Procedures

A managed IT service provider can help you develop a disaster recovery and/or business continuity plan. Proactive planning is the key to avoiding long-term business disruptions. Any plan should include both disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans as each has a slightly different focus.

The University of Central Florida explains, “business continuity focuses on keeping the lights on and the business open in some capacity [during a disaster], while disaster recovery focuses on getting operations back to normal [after a disaster].”

A Managed IT Service Provider Can Help You Be Prepared When a Crisis Hits

If the worst happens, will you be able to run your business? What happens if your office building is leveled by a tornado? Floods? Catches fire? Suffers a cyberattack? We hope that will never happen. But hope isn’t a foolproof business strategy.

At SandStorm IT, we’ve made it our mission to ensure that businesses can survive whatever IT issues come their way. Schedule a call to discuss how we can partner with your business and help you with all of your IT needs