AUGUST 2012: No business wants anything to go wrong with its IT system — hopping along at a continuous, productive and profitable pace is definitely the way to go!
But our world is imperfect. The power goes out. The Internet goes down. Things break. Storms roll in. Not to mention it’s a frog-eat-frog world out there. So if you’ve made it this far into 2012 and have yet to ask these 16 extremely important questions about your IT resiliency and business continuity, delay no longer. Read on:
1. Is our network performing as reliably as we want?
2. Is our hardware up to the tasks that we’re asking it to perform?
3. Do we have enough bandwidth?
4. What’s the plan if we lose power?
5. What’s the plan if we lose telecom services?
6. What’s the plan if we lose Internet service?
7. How will we deal with having no power, phone or Internet service if it’s out for a few days?
8. What’s our Recovery Time Objective (RTO), or the time it will take to recover after our system goes down?
9. What’s our Recovery Point Objective (RPO) or the maximum amount of time that we can afford to lose data?
10. When was the last time we fully tested our disaster recovery plan?
11. How can we reduce the likelihood of a critical event occurring in the first place?
12. Do we have the right redundancies in place?
13. Are all of our systems backed up?
14. Are all of our systems secure from external threats?
15. How about internal threats?
16. Has each employee been trained what to do if our system goes down?
A robust, resilient IT architecture design and spot-on advance planning give you major muscle when it comes to keeping your business operating.
You want your IT team to identify potential risks ahead of time, take precautions to prevent them from happening in the first place, respond quickly when something does happen, and have everything back to normal as soon as possible. with as little data loss as possible! So ask these questions at least once a year, and every time you make a change in your business operations or organization.
